A Year of Music

Today marks the rollout of last.fm’s on-demand streaming music service. This is and isn’t a big deal. On the one hand, it’s free, and they got the agreement of the four major labels and the largest indie aggregators (IODA and the Orchard), so there’s a lot of music, and it’s all available now. You should go check it out. On the other hand, Napster did more or less the same thing over a year ago as a way to drive potential paying customers to their site (and their higher-quality paid offering) and doesn’t appear to have benefited from it; analysts keep saying they’re doomed, and Rhapsody, my employers, have been steadily pushing our integration with social networking sites like Facebook. On a third hand, last.fm has been offering free internet radio for a long time now, and the difference between “internet radio” and “on-demand streaming” means a lot more to people trying to market (and profit from) those services than it does to your average music fan, I suspect.

I think it’s interesting that this is the first big change last.fm has made in the wake of selling themselves to CBS (which has no relationship to the old CBS Records label they sold start Sony back in 1988, although confusingly enough, they did restart a new CBS Records label at the end of 2006 to push music tied to their television shows). Subscription streaming is a tough, and so far unprofitable, business, and CBS must really believe that it can create a big market for last.fm’s advertisers if it hopes to make its money through advertising alone. It baffles me that so many executives think they can save the music business by giving its primary product away for free, especially because one of the main lessons I’ve taken away from watching the onward march of filesharing is that people vastly prefer having the music in their possession, legally or not.

In any case, I’ve been using Audioscrobbler to keep track of my listening for several years now, and after some growing pains, last.fm has turned into a smooth and professionally-run service. I wish them luck. We’re all going to need it.