The music streaming service Last.fm announced earlier today in a blog post that they would retire their on-demand track streaming for customers in the UK, US and Germany. On-Demand playback on Last.fm was restricted to some countries and basically allowed users from those countries to listen to full-length previews of those songs. Last.fm radio streams on the other hand are not affected by this decision.
The official reasoning behind that change is that Last.fm users have for some time now used other music services as well to listen to music and that it would be in the best interest of all parties involved if Last.fm would concentrate on their core mission and leave the music streaming to those music providers instead.
The changes are already shown on the sites. Single music tracks like the one shown above now display a preview this track link (to listen to 30 seconds of the track) and links to partner sites which vary heavily depending on the user’s location in the world.
The beta launch partners are Spotify, MOG and The Hype Machine with more – including Vevo and We7, in the pipeline.
Last.fm will concentrate their efforts on music strategy including statistics, scrobbling and their music recommendatino engine as well as community features offered on their websites.
The move itself can be seen as a positive one for users who are not living in the countries that were able to access the on-demand streaming feature. These users actually benefit from the change as they can now access those third party music streaming services, some of which are available for a worldwide audience, directly from within Last.fm.
Users from the US, UK and Germany on the other hand lose the ability to play full-length music tracks directly on the Last.fm website but the partner services ensure that they can still listen to full-length tracks on those partner sites.
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I don’t lament the loss of the flash player, but I am completely frustrated with the loss of a feature which made me feel hopeful and proud of what Last.FM was doing; opening the doors to a plethora of artists, genres & styles, tagging conventions, songs, and most importantly – the part that ties it all together, the social aspect of this site. It was like having the old mix-tape era re-born with modern technologies.
The direction where Last.FM was going with the statistics, a well organized site and easy to navigate (and most importantly use) site, its social network, scrobblers, radios, and finally on demand play via the site made (in my opinion) Last.FM truly the last FM (radio) station anyone ever needed. I fully believed that this site, and every product and service under its umbrella was the evolution of radio and music, all tied together through the Last.FM name; and that we were experiencing the beta of that transition, that evolution. The loss of full track streaming relegates Last.FM as just another music service oriented site, but not the game changing powerhouse it could be.
These past 2 years alone we have seen Last.FM find its way into the homes of millions upon millions of people with the services they provide via third party clients and radios (Xbox 360) as a simple example. I’m not trying to say that the loss of full track streaming will somehow hinder the growth of Last.FM in those markets, what it will do – however – is hinder the growth of the parent site… the same site that helps Last.FM maintain itself as the web’s musical cousin of other social networking sites like Facebook.
There was a golden opportunity here for future growth of Last.FM as a label, as a product, as a solution to the ongoing disparity between the music labels, RIAA, etc. and the consumers. Personally (again, I’m clearly stating that this is an opinion here), the full track streaming took Last.FM one step closer to that ideal, that goal that the consumers keep wanting but “the industry” keeps not getting about its base, we want to listen to music, we want to listen to it whenever we want, how we want – provide that for us and we’ll gladly pay for that premium, that service, the convenience; fight us at every step and we’ll find other ways of getting what we want. Ideally, that solution would have included Last.FM and provided Last.FM with our loyalty.