David Emery OnlineLast but with potential
24 January 2008
With much fanfare and self congratulation, Last.fm have announced the availability of full length tracks on their site. They’ve made out that this is some form of revolution, but it’s really not.
For a start, they we beaten to the punch by American social network imeem who announced a similar deal over a month ago. Both of them have all four major labels on board, and a clutch of indies (but by no means all of them) – a brief check with bands like Arctic Monkeys and The White Stripes shows that ironically for a site that emphasises its music credibility it has more mainstream pop then it does independent music.
Also, unlike imeem there is a strict 3 play limit on how often you can listen to songs, which seems odd considering the labels would still get paid for each of those additional listens. I assume that they’re worried that people would just give up buying music altogether and only listen to Last.fm, which is crazy; Last.fm in its current form is a lousy way of listening to music – while playing one track or album is easy doing anything more complicated like playlists is impossible. Also, who really listens to music (properly, at least – more then the odd track on MySpace) on their computer?
Of course, imeem wasn’t the first to do this either. Napster had a go back in 2006 which allowed you to listen to tracks 5 times, and look where it got them; similarly Real have had a few goes along similar lines over the years. As Apple has found with the iPod, people really like listening to music on the go, which I think is the first area Last.fm should target now they’ve got this large but slightly useless catalogue. An iPhone compatible version of the full track streaming Last.fm player would be very interesting, although obviously potentially limited by the connection options available to the iPhone (it would work great over WiFi, but that’s very fleeting on the move). You would still want some form of playlist functionality, though, and I can’t see advertisements working on that kind of platform.
The real open goal that Last.fm should be aiming for is to become the YouTube of music. I’ve long lamented the lack of a real player in this space, and now they have the ability to play full tracks they could really clean up here, and all they have to do is to make a simple embedable player that lets you put any song on Last.fm on any site. A YouTube player for music. imeem have got a embedable player, but it’s limited to 30s previews, presumably due to the lack of ad revenues it generates, so there is a massive gap in the market still there for the taking.
Go on Last.fm. Do something truly revolutionary.
More reading:
Last.fm Joins The Crowd In Offering Not-Really-Free Music; Press Hypes It As New
All Major Labels to Stream Free Music on Last.fm
MobileScrobbler
Last.fm client for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch