Forum → Sort your shit out LastFM..

Thank you for your feedback, we will pass it on to the product team.

In future, please refrain from posting offensive messages on Last.fm (i.e. your last thread). I can appreciate that you're frustrated with the service (or lack of), but nevertheless, that kind of offensive language is not appropriate on a public forum.

Hi James,

Thank you for raising your concerns.

>>>I heard the Last.fm radio app on iphone was free once upon a time, now you you need to "subscribe"? what's with that?

Technically, Last.fm radio isn't 'free' and never has been. As much as we'd like to, sadly, we can't make radio free out of the goodness of our hearts. Everything you hear on the site or through your mobile device has to be paid for - even if you listen to it on your PC without a subscription, we still have to pay record labels, collection agencies, and artists for every stream played on the site.

You may have heard that individual streams don't cost much, and you're right it's often a fraction of a cent, but when you have tens of millions of listeners using the radio service constantly, it very quickly adds up. I can't say what the exact figures are off the top of my head, but I encourage you to look up 'last.fm loss', 'last.fm financials', and 'spotify loss' on Google. It's sobering reading.

Simply put, we need to cover our licensing costs somehow, and we do this in two ways - subscription and advertising on the site. Advertising covers the bulk cost, and allows us to offer 'free-to-listener' advert supported radio on the main site in the US, UK, and Germany. Unfortunately, we're currently unable to offer advert-supported radio on mobile and hardware devices, and therefore we're unable to offer free-to-listeners radio on these devices. So instead, we ask for a small subscription ($3 a month), to cover the streaming cost.

People often say "what about my laptop? that's a mobile device isn't it?". This is a good question, and honestly, it get's complicated here because music licensing actually differs per device and territory, which is why we currently only support a limited amount of devices in a limited amount of countries. However, the simple answer is that an internet connected laptop is just a personal computer running the standard website, and therefore we can offer advertising and ad-supported radio as usual (in fact, I'm working from a laptop myself -- unless they need the additional processing power, most staff here use laptops). Mobile and hardware devices are completely different platforms, and would require us to rethink our entire advertising strategy (probably in the form of audio ads, like spotify). That's not something we're able to do right now, but never say never.

So to summarise -

1. Radio isn't free, we have to pay for it somehow.
2. We do this with advertising and subscriptions.
3. We are currently unable to offer advertising on mobile and hardware devices.
4. Instead we ask for a small subscription to cover the costs.
5. This isn't set in stone - obviously we want to expand our reach and make our service available to as many people as possible

>>>do you have a good reason for extorting money out of innocent people in this way when there are other apps that do the same thing for free?

As I said - music costs money, we ask for a small monthly payment to cover the costs in return for the convenience of having our entire music library at your disposal, on the go. I respect that it's frustrating to be asked to pay for a service that you're accustomed to getting for free; but nevertheless, I'd argue that you are not an innocent person, vulnerable to exploitation -- you're an informed, intelligent customer, perfectly aware of your options as a consumer.

Let me round this off by running through several of those options. I think Spotify charges about £10 a month for its mobile streaming service. We7 is free, but has adverts to cover the costs (I think, I've never used it). Last.fm is £3 a month for streaming on it's mobile app, the app itself is free to use otherwise (scrobbling, events, etc). Compatibility and availability vary between services.

http://www.we7.com/mobile - free radio + adverts | £10/month
http://www.last.fm/subscribe - £3/month
http://www.spotify.com/uk/mobile/overview/ - £10/month

As an informed consumer, the choice is yours to weigh up the various options and go with what seems like the best deal to you.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback. I hope this offers an adequate explanation for the subscription charge for mobile devices.

I'm closing this thread as it's gone off on a tangent from the original post. However, I should mention that we're always looking for feedback on our subscription package -- if you want to let us know how we could improve it, and make it better value for money for you, please let us know here. Thanks.