Last.FM To Require Subscription For Mobiles and Home Devices

Hummdis writes "If you, like so many others, listen to Last.FM on your mobile or home entertainment devices, then you're going to need to pay for this once-free service effective February 15th. It remains free to listen on the Last.FM website, Xbox Live, Windows Mobile 7 phones and the desktop app, but if you want to continue to listen on Android, your Blu-ray player, or any other device, you'll need to spend the $3.00 per month to be able to do so."

Pandora it is then

[Anonymous Coward]

Good call, dopes..

Quality is the issue for me

[Lyrata]

I've used Last.fm for a long time, but on my Android phone (Droid 1) the quality is mediocre at best and cuts out on occasion. I won't be paying for this.

Not relevant because of grooveshark

[uigrad_2000]

Last.fm is hardly relevant today, because of grooveshark.

Grooveshark is like last.fm, except that you can play any list of songs you want in any order that you want, and you can rewind/fast forward as you wish. Oh, and it lets you play music all day long (there is no limit to number of minutes you can be connected).

I'm surprised that the RIAA hasn't come down like a ton of bricks on Grooveshark yet. It is different from limewire and napster-classic in just two ways:

• The music you stream cannot easily be downloaded for storage for offline play.
• Anything that looks like Pink Floyd is removed. That's the only band that Grooveshark admins fear.

Wonder who's sponsoring this...

[lowlymarine]

Free on the desktop, XBox Live, and Windows Phone 7, eh? Gee, how inconspicuous. But seriously, with all the stuttering the Android app was worthless unless you were ONLY listening to Last.FM and not trying to actually use your multitasking anyways; if I had to guess, they didn't give the audio stream the right level of priority. Since no other media player had those kind of problems, I wasn't sure whether it was merely incompetence or an attempt to drive people away from using the radio on their phones. I guess now we know?

Google Listen?

[iONiUM]

There's always Google Listen [googlelabs.com]. It's not live streaming, but it has a large library of "casts" (should I really use the word "pod" for non-iOS centric speech?) available for your to peruse. Just sayin'..

Licensing

[JBMcB]

Because of draconian content distribution licensing schemes. Buying a license to stream over the internet is probably per-device, so computers require once license to distribute, handhelds/phones need another license fee, set-top boxes need another fee...

I used to work for a radio company and we ran into the same problems. Some content we paid for could be put over the airwaves and over the streaming internet station, some of it could only be put over the air, depending on the licensing. The company even got into trouble for having a pause button on the player, as that constituted downloading internet content which fell under a separate license than internet "streaming."