Last.fm Radio Announcement

What do you think of this? Why not find another source of income?
Seems unfair that the richest countries in the world are not going to pay for the service.

http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement

If you want to delete your account, the option's in the 'data' tab in settings.

I'm pretty surprised by this, but I'm sure it's a decision they were forced into rather than one they made themselves.

And here I was thinking the internet meant global equality. Last.fm back to the virtual Middle Ages.

I've been supporting and using audioscrobbler and last.fm for 5 years, partly as a subscriber.

do I mind paying a small monthly fee for a nice service? Not really.

do I mind not getting the same perks as other people based purely on location on a medium such as the Internet? VERY MUCH SO.

I can't express how much this disappoints and saddens me.

I find it quite insulting and I think everybody who comes from outside the US, UK, or Germany. If this is it, then I am unforunately out the door.

dankine said:
rickmb said:
I wouldn't have minded paying for Last.fm. But paying because I'm from the wrong country? That's the most insulting thing any online service (or offline for that matter) has ever done.You are actually required to pay since
'These are the countries in which we have the most resources to support an ad sales organization, which is how we earn money to pay artists and labels for their music.'Yet you all still continue to moan because youre in the 'wrong' country, instead of reading what is stated.

You're merely confirming the point. These resources didn't appear out of thin air. These countries are the "right" countries, the others are the "wrong" countries.

Just because it makes financial sense on a spreadsheet doesn't make it right, and certainly not less insulting.

You don't treat your loyal users that way. And least Pandora made an early decision, and apologized. Last.fm profited from our data and our word of mouth marketing for years, and then tells us to go f*** ourselves because we're not commercially interesting enough, ie, from the wrong country.

(For the purposes of this post, I want to make it extra clear that I'm not staff, and you shouldn't take this as an official Last.fm stance)rickmb said:
You're merely confirming the point. These resources didn't appear out of thin air. These countries are the "right" countries, the others are the "wrong" countries.They're not the "right" or "wrong" countries, they're the countries which provide enough ad revenue to support the service's overheads and the ones which don't.

Just because it makes financial sense on a spreadsheet doesn't make it right, and certainly not less insulting.Capitalism disagrees. If your country doesn't make up a large enough portion of the userbase for free radio to be justified financially, then that's unfortunate. But that doesn't mean they should reduce the quality of the service in countries which are able to support themselves without a "subscription only" status for the radio streams.

You don't treat your loyal users that way. And least Pandora made an early decision, and apologized. Last.fm profited from our data and our word of mouth marketing for years, and then tells us to go f*** ourselves because we're not commercially interesting enough, ie, from the wrong country.You're not being told to "go f*** yourselves", you're being asked to buy a subscription if you want to use the streams. The sites other features are still available without subscription, and everything which was available to you previously still is available for the (relatively small) price of a subscription. Nobody's expecting you to like the change, but don't take it so personally. If it's not commercially viable to continue streaming to non-subscribers in a particular reason (remember, licensing restrictions differ throughout the world and has to be sorted out individually, it's not like they just buy one license which allows them to stream to anybody but have decided to arbitrarily single out some locations as having to pay), they can't be expected to do so.

Last.fm for me in the last years was a totally new method for my music listening experience... this is really the end of an era... it brought to me so much change in habits that it's really painful now to go back to good old "locally" stored music and manual research of new groups and genres...
There's one reason I'm not gonna pay a single cent for continue using Last.fm... I will never pay for listening with that crap of never updated Last.fm Client...

Humm,
I understand why this has happened and if I owned last.fm I would probably have made the same decision because more money is always the best decision ,,,yeh?....But yes just because people understand the reasons doesn't make it right or wrong. And for the record I believe its wrong..

Streaming Radio for me is the best way I hear new artists music songs I wouldn't normal come across. Sure the fee seems minimal, but with "Global recession" here I think everything just adds up worse now then ever. I got a mail from my mobile phone company.. oh no 2$ increase for bill printing! Oh no cable tv bill same thing.. Whats that on the news ATM machines now charging $2.50 per transaction?.. my ambulance cover again increased a few dollars.. now last fm is charging! =(
This is the dagger through my heart!

im sick of everything going up slightly because its happening to everything!
Oh but its ok cos its a small fee...and everyone can pay small fees..right?

This site is obviously quite profitable or else it wouldn't be running....I rather be banned (or limited to like 30 min a day or something)from streaming radio until my country seems to be worthy.. Then I will go on a last fm promotion crusade...

kapurapu said:
Any good recommendations?
"

Try grooveshark and spotify

DFA1979 said:
WichitaQ said:
am i the only one wondering what happened to those $280mil? o.oIt will have gone to the people who CBS bought the site from. If you buy a second hand car for £10,000, the guy who used to own the car now has £10,000 - the car doesn't have £10,000 to spend on fixing itself up.

oh, but one would have thought that at least a bit of it would have gone to the last.fm staff :\



and honestly, if this is going to make money, then it's suitable... last.fm is a bussiness and making money is it's primary function... the fact that they're going to lose a lot of users is ignored when standing next to the fact that a lot more people are going to subscribe...

Last.fm states the reason to exclude USA,UK,DE from paying is that advertising actually works in those countries. Obviously this is discriminating - those are the richest countries AND they make up the majority of users at Last.fm - So, does anyone know how much time of work is needed in countries like Somalia, Bangladesh or Cuba to earn 3 Dollars?? This is almost an act of racism and I am totally disappointed. It is also clear that this advertising-reason is a fake: Last.fm uses those countries as a test field - they think : 'Ok, let's try this in all but the most important countries and see how many people are willing to pay'

kapurapu said:
Try grooveshark and spotify

I would love to get an invite to spotify.

you really wouldnt, its a real piece of shit.

freigeist said:
Last.fm states the reason to exclude USA,UK,DE from paying is that advertising actually works in those countries. Obviously this is discriminating - those are the richest countries AND they make up the majority of users at Last.fm - So, does anyone know how much time of work is needed in countries like Somalia, Bangladesh or Cuba to earn 3 Dollars?? This is almost an act of racism and I am totally disappointed. It is also clear that this advertising-reason is a fake: Last.fm uses those countries as a test field - they think : 'Ok, let's try this in all but the most important countries and see how many people are willing to pay'
You're very correct about the reason. The ad supported service in certain regions (US, UK, Germany) can actually cover LastFM's costs. Bandwidth costs alone can be very high for streaming music. In other regions like Bangledesh for example there is no online ad market for LastFM to offset it's costs, and unfortunately there won't be any online ad market in those regions for a really long time.

Disappointing? Perhaps. Racist? I think that is a very strong statement against a company that obviously loves music and is providing us a great service.