So long, Last.fm. Thanks for all the Gish
The popular music site Last.fm was a fun experiment for me. They announced a couple of days ago that they were going to start charging a subscription fee for use of their streaming music. US, UK and German listeners will still get the full service for free.
I don’t envy them their position of having to deal with the recording industry (to which they are closely connected via parent company CBS). I don’t expect it’s easy to run a company that gives away music when the RIAA is doing its damnedest to squash file-sharing. I do find it annoying that they’ve carved out three large populations and said, “you can play for free and we’ll just make our money off of these other countries”. I was always under the impression that giving Last.fm our music listening data via scrobbling was all the payment they required. That data’s valuable for tracking what people listen to, how often they listen to it, and I’m sure they can do all sorts of interesting statistical and probabilistic analyses on it to sell it back to the music industry. I guess that’s not the case.
About that data. Knowing that I was shipping listening information to Last.fm made me aware of my listening habits in an unusual way. I was always cognizant of the fact that my listening was being sent upstream to another entity. I was interested in increasing the number of songs I listened to. I was aware when I was listening to certain music “too frequently” and would try to curb that to a degree. I wanted my played music to be representative of my entire collection rather than a few favorite albums. This is subtle, but it changed the way I listened to my music, and not necessarily in a good way. It’s like I was listening to my collection for other people and not just myself.
What did I get out of this? I did get a few very solid musical recommendations. I sent some money to iTunes to buy albums from *stellastar, Cut/Copy, The Helio Sequence and others directly based on Last.fm’s recommendations. The social aspect never really panned-out for me though. I don’t pay attention to what my friends are listening to in any meaningful way. The discussion groups were not interesting to me. It doesn’t really feel much like a “community” in the way that Flickr and other social sites do.
To be fair, $5 per month isn’t a lot of money. I pay that for Xbox Live, but I would have to say that I get a lot more for my money on Xbox Live. Or Flickr Pro. Being able to stream low-quality music over a Flash-based player is not a good value for me considering I always have an iPod of some type close by.
So there we have it. I’m sorry we can’t be friends anymore, Last.fm. I may be back from time-to-time to check in and look up some music. Maybe I’ll take a look at Blip.fm to see what that’s like… If you’ve got a favorite music service on the web (don’t talk to me about Pandora. They don’t like Canada) that works in Canada. Drop me a note in the comments.
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