Starting April 28, Last.fm will no longer offer its subscription-based streaming radio service. As Billboard points out, the company was considered an online music pioneer since it began in 2002 but has run into some obstacles over the years and is trying to find the right business model for streaming music.
Although there will no longer be a subscription service, Last.fm said it will continue to deliver personalized music via a new music player, currently in the testing phase, which pipes in outsourced audio from YouTube, VEVO and Spotify. These arrangements allow the company to avoid paying licensing fees while still delivering streaming music to users. The site's team will gear its focus to scrobbling, music discovery and recommendations.
"Following the launch of the new Last.fm Player earlier this year and Last.fm's partnership with Spotify for on-demand playback, we've revised the subscription service in order to focus on the new Last.fm Player and Last.fm's over-arching mission: world-class music recommendations," Simon Moran, Last.fm's managing director said in a statement to Billboard.
As Billboard points out, it's unclear how many subscribers will be affected by the change, but Moran told them "subscriptions changes only affect a small sub-set of Last.fm users."
Will you be affected by the change? Do you plan to keep using the service? Let us know in the comments section below!
