There was an announcement today from Last.fm that read:
CBS-owned (NYSE: CBS) social music discovery and radio service Last.fm announced on Tuesday that it is discontinuing the on-demand song streaming service on its website, which had been available for the past two years in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, and will no longer host music videos.
What, Last.fm didn’t like paying tons of cash to have people play music for free? That’s amazing! Of course they cancelled this. They were offering free services which grew traffic but not monetizing those users at all. Not surprisingly someone asked why their offered the freebies. The release continued to read:
The company also said a number of new digital music services will now support “scrobbling” of tracks to users’ Last.fm charts. They include Spotify, The Hype Machine, MOG, We7 and Vevo.
This is the only reason i know of that people use Last.fm. People want to know what their most popular track is and it’s interesting to see what are the most played tracks. Where does this lead? It leads to last.fm being the Neilsons or Comscore or Billboard of the future. This site will tell us what’s popular and by who. In my mind, this is the future they have. I wonder if CBS is regretting paying $280 million in cash for them.
Does this mean I can stop getting Twitter spammed with every song someone listens to throughout the day? Because that would be phenomenal.
probably not. Twitter spam will always be here. You're SOL
“This is the only reason i know of that people use Last.fm.”
this is how i use last.fm
– scrobble from my itunes for logging my habits and contributing to the “similar artist” algorithm that factors in proximal listening
– to get free mp3s and albums from artists
– to research bands that don't have a wiki page
– to find new bands thru similar artists
i rarely stream on it but i hope they keep their free mp3s.