full functionality world-wide for subscribers after March 30?

Unfortunately not. The country restrictions on these services are part of the contract we have with the device providers, and so these contracts would need to be re-negotiated for that to be improved.

Yes, exactly, thats something we really need.. a "non commercial / independent" last.fm, what happened to those indepent people in last.fm? did you broke with them or what?

hi Russ

thanks for the explanation. this is really bad news, though :-(

in fact, this means that non-US/UK/D residents need to pay (more) for less features!

regards
André

It's amazing that the music industry tend to kill pretty much every advance in technology.

Different rules for different countries in Europe will be troublesome though. If the Germans and the Bristish can use the service for free then there is no reason why the French and the Danish shouldn't. Expect trouble, last.fm...research "iTunes"...

adamzZz said:
Russ, I need to ask about one thing. There are many tracks from Warner and its labels that are somehow playing in all of the Last.fm radios. Wouldn't it be a good idea to mark them as 'playable only in radios' - for example with a grey 'play' button?

We're aware of this request, but it's difficult to implement in a way which doesn't look confusing to new users.

According to this article: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=32507 - are new releases from Warner going to be added to catalogue?

That story is back from the dead - it dates from May 2008, which is when our contract with Warner expired, and someone misread the date and republished it.

Russ said:
adamzZz said:
Russ, I need to ask about one thing. There are many tracks from Warner and its labels that are somehow playing in all of the Last.fm radios. Wouldn't it be a good idea to mark them as 'playable only in radios' - for example with a grey 'play' button?
We're aware of this request, but it's difficult to implement in a way which doesn't look confusing to new users.

What should be so confusing about the meaning of these two icons:

tracks with preview
tracks on the radio

If you want new users to subscribe for the radio features you should show them what you have to offer. And while you are on it, make the difference of FOD and FLP clear again. Show the world that you have a radio service worth subscribing to and at the same time a broad platform for "free non-commerical / independent artist".

Does anyone remember the yellow and blue triangles? You replaced them in the course of Free The Music with the argumentation:

Matthew Ogle:
we’re easing away from the concepts of preview / full track / full length preview / etc etc etc.

Basically, we want “I click play and the full track plays to me, for free” to become the defacto standard Last.fm experience. You click play and it works — you shouldn’t have to understand our internal licensing model and technical infrastructure, that’s our job. Yours is listening to awesome music! ;)

(I appreciate the current design isn’t all the way there yet, but that’s where we’re heading and hopefully explains it a bit.)
i guess this approach is history and part of the confusion now.

How about the words "Radio Only" on top of each other, written very small?

People keep suggesting yet another icon to confuse people; just say what it is and avoid the problem. When stacked on top of each other the words don't take much more length than an icon and it's not like last.fm is lacking in white space to fill up.

Again, this is not my choice, this is the choice of our (excellent) UI designers. We have to take into account completely new users as well as established users, and so we need to design the UI accordingly.

All I can say is that we hear you :).

That money should be enough to convince a bunch of music rights holders to unlock full track preview and even downloads?

As long as they can know that they get significant access to that money based on popularity and quality rated by the paying international users?

Can you not provide a "Allow Full Track Preview only to Subscribers" and "All Track Downloads on to Subscribers" features and that the artists or rights holders can see a significant revenue from activating those features only to International subscribers?

killer041178 said:
Well, that's it then, seems like I will have to go and buy the music I want to listen to, rather than pay 3 euros per month for playing (not so) randomly chosen tracks. and then you'll return because there's a world of difference between £100s a year on CDs and streaming them for here for ... ahem...

We haven't had time to digest the news and absorb the change. We've been given next to no notice. So if they've lost people because of that, tough, they should have thought it through. It's not like it's rocket science or anything. It should have been no less than 14 days if it was really that urgent, but more like 3 months minimum. Ideally a year.

Everyone who has left is perfectly within their rights. It's an awful shame they're going to lose their charts etc that they spent so much time creating. And all because this hasn't been handled properly.

Russ said:
Again, this is not my choice, this is the choice of our (excellent) UI designers. We have to take into account completely new users as well as established users, and so we need to design the UI accordingly.

All I can say is that we hear you :).

You hear us? Great! :-))

But you are ignoring our suggestions and the need for showing us EVERY radio-streamable track! BAD! :-((