Last.fm: not free any more

The management of the popular music service Last.fm has announced the soon imposition of a fee for the service. In order to have an access to usual services, including Internet radio, user recommendations, pop charts, artistsâ€™ biographies, videos and information on live concerts during a month, users from different countries will have to pay about 3 euros or the equivalent amount in local currency.
User charge will be free only for the people of Germany, Britain and the USA. Citizens of these countries will be able to continue using of the free version of Last.fm, which return interests to the owners at the expense of published advertisement. Advertising fees in other countries, according to owners, are too small and does not cover all the costs on providing services. We remind that the management of Last.fm, in addition, pays the license costs to the right holders, without mentioning the stable income that they gain. Letâ€™s remember that Last.fm is a very curious hybrid of online audio library and social network. Service offers music lovers a giant music catalog, which includes 7 million songs available for online listening. The customers especially enjoy additional services that allow users to make up audio collections, with a glance to the personal preferences of the user, and to select compositions by recommendations of the people with similar musical tastes.
The list of Last.fm partners, purchased by the CBS corporation last year, includes 280'000 performers and sound-recording studios. And the number of service customers has exceeded 20 million people according to data of 2008. Unfortunately, Last.fm is not the first service, which has to make changes to the adopted model of the distribution of audio content. Some time ago, the management of another musical web resource Pandora has also appealed to its customers with the message of upcoming changes. The reason for future changes will be the amendment of copyright-law in the USA, after which the costs for providing music content to clients in streaming format may become unduly high, wired.com writes.