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Digital Top Stories
Last.fm turns off on-demand streaming
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 13 April 2010
Last.fm has dropped the on-demand streaming part of its service, the bit which proved controversial in the early days, and which was positioned as being a core part of the web platform after CBS took the company over in 2007 and struck up licensing deals with the major record companies. The aim from this point onwards is to link people looking for on-demand music to other services which ‘scrobble’, so rival digital music platforms which can send listening stats back to a user’s Last.fm profile.
On-demand streaming was presumably one of the more expensive-to-run elements of the Last.fm offer, so much so track-listen limitations were introduced and the service was only available to paying subscribers outside the UK, US and Germany. It seemed increasingly unlikely Last.fm could really compete with the more compelling on-demand streaming services on the market like Spotify and MOG, so working with those services rather than competing with them is a sensible option; and has seemingly been an option on the Last.fm agenda for sometime.
Last.fm will continue to provide its Pandora-style personalised radio system, but will focus on enhancing its stats, artist and track profile and social networking services, which are areas where they have always better competed with rivals. Though whether there is serious money to be made out of any of those services long term remains to be seen; on-demand streaming, while expensive and risky, is arguably a more viable business to be in, in both the subscription and ad-funded domain.
Partner services Last.fm will link to for on-demand streaming include Spotify in Europe, MOG in the US, MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine, and moving forward We7 and Vevo where those services operate. You get the feeling Last.fm will actually look to work with any digital music provider able to support the scrobbling stats system.
Confirming the change, the Last.fm team wrote in a blog post yesterday: “We believe that this renewed focus on Last.fm as the definitive online home of your music taste and your base for music discovery – regardless of where you listen – will help improve not just our users’ musical lives but the overall online ecosystem as well”.
