Last.fm Announces Subscription Based Service
Web services like Last.fm are hard pressed to find ways to monetize their inventory to even come close to the bills for the server structure, administrative and development teams, bandwidth and everything else that is connected to their service.This is especially true for services that stream media on their websites as this usually results in heavy traffic.
Last.fm have now announced that they will start a subscription based service for a large part of their user base which will go live on March 30, 2009. Users not living in the countries United States, United Kingdom or Germany will have to pay a subscription fee of $3 per month if they want to continue listening to Last.fm radio. All other parts of the website remain freely accessible for anyone.
Users not accessing from the three countries listed get a 30 track free trial before they cannot listen to the radio streams anymore unless they subscribe to the service. It is unclear if that 30 free track trial resets each month or if it is only available once. It should be made clear that this does not affect song previews or full tracks that are listed on the website.
Nothing will change as well for existing subscribers. The Last.fm blog post where the announcement got posted is full of criticism about the move. One of the main questions asked is why those three countries are exempt from the fee.
The reason is ad revenue next to a strategic decision which are considered key markets. Advertisement simply pays less if a user is from India, China or South Africa compared to users from the mentioned key markets. It is an economic decision, and while certainly bad for many Last.fm users, the only feasible move according to Last.fm to keep the service going.
It still remains unclear why Last.fm made the decision. Most users who expressed their opinion think that either the Recording Industry or CBS has something to do with it. If the Recording Industry was the culprit it is most likely because of licensing fees while CBS might want Last.fm to run profitable or at least even.
Update: Last.fm posted a followup on the announcement, and the company confirms what I thought was the reason for the change. Ads are simply not feasible in many parts of the world to cover the operations of Last.fm's radio offerings.
Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?