Last.fm to Charge Users Outside of UK, US and Germany

Today on its blog, Last.fm announced a fundamental shift in the way its streaming music works to most of the world. For users in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany, it will be business as usual. But for everybody else, no more free music after 30 days. That’s how long the current free trial Last.fm Radio subscriptions will last, after which a fee of €3.00 per month will be due. Note that everything else such as scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos, etc., will remain free for all countries.

According to Matt Ogle, one of Last.fm’s developers, the reasoning is that CBS Interactive’s (Last.fm’s parent if you recall they purchased the site back in 2007) salesforce is primarily geared toward an ad-supported model in the three aforementioned countries where Last.fm radio will remain free. In the other markets the potential for ad revenue is significantly weaker, thus CBS Interactive feels that a subscription model is necessary to provide sustainable growth.

Personally I’m shocked by this. I don’t know how you can take such a wonderful service as Last.fm that has been free since its earliest days back in 2002 and all of a sudden start charging a monthly service fee. This is without a doubt going to piss off A LOT of users. And nowadays there is competition aplenty is the online music space, particularly this online music niche *cough* Pandora *cough*. I hope the suits at CBS Interactive are wiser than the masses on this one because I really love Last.fm as a service and use it on an almost daily basis. And although this won’t affect me daily as I’m located in the US, my geek-heart goes out to everyone in the affected geographies, this is truly bollocks!