Play Full Length Music Tracks and Albums at Last.fm

Last.fm is now offering playback of full length music tracks and entire albums on their online music community website for users from the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany with other countries to follow soon thereafter. Songs can be played for a maximum of three times before information about a soon to be coming subscription service pops up. Details about the subscription service which will will have options for unlimited playbacks are scarce at this point, it is only sure that it will cost more than the current subscription price of $2.50 monthly.

Artists get paid whenever a song is played by using revenue sharing, which means that they will be paid by a percentage of the advertising revenue based on the number of plays. Contracts with all four major labels made this improvement possible which could be a great step in the right direction.

A quick check revealed that the implementation has not been finalized yet but that you can access a lot of full length tracks already. Give it a day or two and everything will sort out. Users are a little bit confused for instance about existing playlists and embedded content.

I’m not a regular Last.fm user though and it would be nice if regular users could voice their opinion on the change.