Last.fm just announced that “you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website”.
Well, as long as you don’t listen more than 3 times your favorites songs … After that, you’ll be proposed a subscription service (no additional details yet … ?).
Many have predicted a revolution in music distribution in 2008, or praised for an overthrow of the current “regimes”. We have seen the major record labels getting on board with Imeem, but through partnerships. We have seen Amazon and recently Target, according to PaidContent, entering the digital music sales.
Now, we see a major media company, CBS, launching a (almost) free music service. Are the music industry supertankers finally taking a turn ? It seems so, as with this move, it’s not a startup making partnerships or alliances with record labels to distribute free music, it’s the record labels themselves sitting on board of the project.
Besides, the new revenue model is encouraging for artists and labels: advertising revenues are shared with the artists, and their revenue will apparently be proportional to their popularity - which has a negative aspect also: no or little revenue for emerging artists, lot of revenue for accomplished bands. This is close to the AmieStreet model, where the pricing and the artists revenues are based on the demand.
Technorati Tags: amiestreet, last.fm, fee music, online streaming
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This is nothing new actually! Deezer has been offering the same for months and even better since you have unlimited access to every song.
By the way, don’t forget to use all these music streaming services with Free Music Zilla (www.freemusiczilla.com), a very cool little app that let’s you download as an MP3 all the streaming content you listen to. Of course this is not legal… ;)
My point is that this is an important move because it’s done by the big guys. There’s nothing new to online streaming of major labels cataloges, but until recently it was done by startups (ex: Imeem) eventhough they partner with music labels.
Besides, Deezer is on the verge of legal … Isn’t its official status “online radio” with the Sacem (french copyright surveillance institute) ??