So the initial speculation that CBS owned Last.fm was adding a video service proved false(for now). Instead Last.FM has announced, in a post entitled, ‘Free the Music’, that,

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

The news has hit the blogosphere hard with sites not only sites in the usual Tech blogosphere covering it, but also Lifehack sites, like Lifehacker, and GHacks.

The Last.fm streaming of songs is limited to 3 plays per song, and then displays an ad for the as yet released subscription service. So its limited streaming and then subscription.

My question is, hasn’t this been tried before? Sure they have deals with all the major studios(including holdout Sony), and what they are doing with monetization of independent artists by allowing them to put up full songs for a share of advertising revenue is intriguing, but isn’t it just a retread of other sites?

Rhapsody offers a similar service for a subscription fee that has large number of songs(Last.fm purports to have 2.5 million), and so does Napster. The only real difference is that the Last.fm service is 3 plays per song instead of 25 songs a month like the free Rhapsody version, and while that is a huge leap, the new free preview service is still just that, a preview. Its not like you’re going to be able to use it to listen to as much music as you want without paying for it, any more than you already could with Last.fm, and the subscription service is on par with Rhapsody or Napster. The other difference is that unlike the others services, its browser based(although Napster has a web based version). I don’t know the price point but I wager its comparable(and probably won’t include the nice to go services of Napster and Rhapsody).

Of course Imeem already offers a similar function, and is ad supported, of course as the NYTimes points out Imeem only tracks tracks that are user uploaded, but that is hardly a barrier once the service has a significant number of people using the service.

Now if you’re using Last.fm to illegally download music you’re streaming, then this is certainty a big move, since you can use a program like Free Music Zilla to get the music you’re streaming, but you could already do that with Pandora, which has always had a larger selection of mainstream music in its streams than Last.fm that you can steal. Now its easier since you can select the tracks instead of having to wait for them in the stream, but that just means the potential for abuse is greater.

Who knows, maybe I’m wrong about this whole thing and Last.fm will succeed more than Rhapsody, Napster or even Imeem(the last one I doubt because its unlimited, although, again, user uploaded) because of their three times preview, but I highly doubt it.

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