The main oops here is this is extremely bad PR both for the industry and for the users. Saying 300+ million people just in Europe are not worth your advertising efforts says a lot about your company and also manages to come across as unfairness and 'the rest of us is paying for you to listen' to the end users - I know this is not so, but that is how it sounds for many. Also, they failed to provide a payment method for at least half of their users worldwide. Oops. Sounds that they want to cut costs more than they want to make money.
As pointed out, this also marks the season start for proxy hunting (or switching service), whichever is easier. In any case, that's a decrease in userbase (both paying and non-paying) and we'll see if last.fm can survive that and what other changed will it bring on.
I said my goodbyes last night, and surfed on over to shoutcast where the advertiser supported music is still free and plentiful. Given time, a replacment will show up. Always does. Whenever a well used service goes pay, or gets caught under the recording industry's wrath, a replacement with better features will show up.
Correct. last.fm employs user discrimination by country (determined by their IP address). People in the USA, UK and Germany need not pay (yet). Everybody else, ~50$ per year.
$50?! It's only £18 a year, or £1.50 a month over here in the UK.
Also, crasbelize, I tried playing last.fm with Vagalume the other day via my phone's 3G, and was thrilled with the results! Practically no skipping whatatsoever. Though I'm not so sure how it'd cope while moving...
$50?! It's only £18 a year, or £1.50 a month over here in the UK.
Also, crasbelize, I tried playing last.fm with Vagalume the other day via my phone's 3G, and was thrilled with the results! Practically no skipping whatatsoever. Though I'm not so sure how it'd cope while moving...
Actually this is my dream.
I need a double din Car PC for my truck, with OS2008 loaded and with my 3G Verizion phone plan this should be pretty sweet.
I'm using vagalume right now, when I checked last.fm this morning it said I had 30 free tracks unless I subscribed. I'll see what happens when that song count runs out.
well, as long as the old last.fm api is still active you can work around the geo-ip restrictions by using a proxy server in the uk, us or in germany. (Tip: http://lastfm.com.pl/ ), and enter it in vagalume Settings - Connection Tab under "use http proxy" in the form of IP:Port.
But the good news is : screw last.fm
Berto added support for libre.fm, what is an open source drop-in replacement for last.fm. You can submit your listened tracks to libre.fm and also streams are available, but the difference is that libre.fm only streams tracks that are licensed under a Creative Commons or another "Copyleft" license.
Originally Posted by
Now that Last.fm is restricted in most countries, the obvious alternative (already discussed in previous posts) was to start offering support for similar services for people that cannot / don’t want to use Last.fm anymore.
