I am for now a happy Spotify user.  Thuesday 24 March Last.fm announced that listening to Last.fm Radio will require a subscription of €3.00 per month. My first thought was fair enough, they have to earn money to pay the license fee. But then hang on a minute, what else did they write in this blog entry?  In the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, nothing will change. Yes, that means that the service stays for free for users from these three countries. That is not something I can or will tolerate. They have defined their users in to two groups: First class users and second class users. First class users get a free ride, that the second class users have to pay. As I live in Norway, I’m defined as a second class user. I guess that the leaders of Last.fm must have been smoking their socks, if they think that they will get away with this. Let darwinsm deal with them (read: finance crise), they have already sent of several of their employees. Now they can close their company.

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Besides this, a post in one of the Last.fm forums adds a couple of things:

  1. The old API to stream music will disappear in a few weeks. Unless I’m missing something, that implies that all clients (official and third party) will stop working, and upgrading them is required to continue using the service.
  2. Streaming music to mobile phones will not be permitted (a comment in the same thread explains that this restriction applies only to phones, so Nokia tablets are not affected).

I am saving my account for now, but I am inches away from deleting all my data on Last.fm and close my account. I guess there are many users that will do that. I have never seen more comments being made on Last.fm’s blog.

Also a friend of me blogged about this in Italian and another in Hungarian.