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Last.fm reinstates on-demand streaming through Spotify partnership
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 30 January 2014
Last.fm has announced that it is re-instating on-demand streaming on its website, via a new partnership with Spotify.
Last.fm turned off its own on-demand streaming service in the last remaining territories where it was available – the UK, US and Germany – in 2010. Never the most user-friendly streaming service in the first place, Last.fm instead provided links to other places for on-demand listening purposes, including Spotify, MOG, Hype Machine, We7 and Vevo.
Though those links all involved users leaving the Last.fm website. This new deal will bring Spotify-hosted tracks into a player built into the Last.fm site (for people with a Spotify account), rather than sending them away somewhere else. This is something Daniel Ek said he’d like to provide Last.fm with at an OpenMusicMedia event in London back in 2009. Better late than never.
In a blog post explaining the partnership, Last.fm said: “We’ve teamed up with Spotify to bring their entire catalogue, on demand, to the world’s leading music recommendation service. Whether it be your own profile page, artist pages or album pages – if Spotify has it, you can play it and control it on Last.fm via the Spotify playbar at the bottom of the screen. Using your Spotify account (premium or free) you can listen to any track simply by pressing the play button. This will load all tracks on a Last.fm page as a playlist in Spotify”.
Last week, Last.fm also announced that it was testing changes to its personalised radio service to source music from YouTube videos, rather than tracks hosted by the site itself. Moving entirely away from self-hosted tracks would presumably mean substantial cost savings for the loss-making website, which may or may not placate current owner CBS.
