Changes are afoot in the world of Last.fm. The popular service announced yesterday that they were starting to charge for radio streaming in countries outside of the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. A €3.00 per month subscription charge will be in place for anyone listening to Last.fm in other parts of the globe, although all the other features on the site will still be available free of charge.
Further alterations to Last.fm’s model were announced today (March 25), with non-official mobile clients now being banned from accessing details of users accounts. Official apps for the iPhone and Android will continue to work, but anyone using Pocket Scrobbler, Mobbler, Flipside or an alternative service will have to look elsewhere for their mobile streaming needs.
According to a statement on the site, Last.fm doesn’t have licensing agreements in place with record labels to allow mobile streaming, and these apps could put the company’s contracts in jeopardy. Further details on the future of the service on mobile devices are outlined
here
:
As you
may have seen
on our blog, we're making some changes to the way we structure our radio services.
Last.fm has never had a public radio API, although we've tolerated third-party clients using the undocumented calls that our client uses. This is finally about to change - we're going to make a public, documented streaming API available to everyone who has an API account. There are a few limitations:
Only subscribers will be allowed to stream using API applications unless you negotiate a separate deal with us - we need to get the money to cover royalties.
You won't be allowed to use our API to stream to mobile phones. This is unfortunately a limitation of some of our licensing agreements. Again, we may be able to make an exception to this if you talk to us directly.
These changes should be made by the end of next week. Alongside this, we'll be shutting down the remainder of the old, undocumented streaming APIs over the next couple of weeks.
Last.fm sucks. They're going over the edge and nobody's going with them. Spotify!!