Last.fm, an early mover in the streaming music business, is scaling back some of its operations, and putting others behind a paywall, in a bid to cut costs and make more money out of its existing business, the company has announced. → Read More
It looks like LinkedIn isn’t the only company dealing with password woes as of late.
Just one day after it was reported that 6.5 million LinkedIn user passwords were dumped onto the web, London-based music recommendation network Last.fm has just recently announced on their website that they too are “investigating the leak of some Last.fm user passwords.” → Read More
Last.fm, the UK-based music startup acquired by media giant CBS in 2007 for $280m (£140m), made a loss for 2009 of just under $4.45 million (£2.84 million), reveal new accounts for the company. The loss posted in 2008 was £17.11 million, reflecting the high costs of streaming music, which the company has now cut. It just goes to show how expensive streaming can be…
Financials published on… → Read More
Navigating the choppy waters of ad-supported music, We7 hasn’t been afraid to change course. The UK startup began life as an innovative free music download service before transitioning to an on-demand browser-based offering. While most recently the company, which is backed by Peter Gabriel, Eden Venture and Spark Ventures, made a premium paid-for play with a desktop and mobile version… → Read More
Is it possible to make online ads “sticky” so that users engage with them longer? That’s the aim of a new partnership between CBS-owned Last.fm and MXP4, the interactive music startup.
Using MXP4′s technology, Last.fm is to begin offering brands the option to create ads that users of the music streaming and discovery service can interact with, such as remixing a track in realtime or “singing… → Read More
If you’ve created music playlists using iTunes, Spotify, Last.fm, YouTube, We Are Hunted, Winamp, Rhapsody, Soundcloud, or even if you’ve simply scribbled a list of your favorite tracks in a notepad file, you need to check out Playlistify soon. The basic, solid premise of the service is to let you enjoy your custom-made playlists anywhere you like.
I was looking for an excuse to write it up… → Read More
Digital music company eMusic is rumored to be up for sale, according to various reports, but that hasn’t stopped it from signing licensing deals with big music. This morning, eMusic announced that it come to an agreement with Warner Music Group and that it will soon begin selling tracks from WMG’s roster of artists to its U.S. users.
eMusic last year inked a similar deal with Sony Music… → Read More
I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do). Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most from this… → Read More
I’ve been in London for two weeks pretending to be part of the Traveling Geeks contingent of bloggers. But really I’ve been doing some deep investigative work on this whole Last.fm scandal.
II showed up at their offices and guess what I found? A pile of servers sitting in a corner waiting to be delivered to the RIAA. Sure, they said they were just old servers… likely story.
I also… → Read More
Flexing their journalistic muscles, the crew at Joystiq have details surrounding Last.fm’s arrival onto Xbox Live, which was announced at E3 this year. It shouldn’t come as a surprise by now, but Gold members will have 24-hour access to the service that’s ad supported for free. → Read More
Last.fm founders Felix Miller, Richard Jones, and Martin Stiksel are leaving the music service they founded in 2002 and sold to CBS for $280 million in 2007.
In a notice on the site’s blog, Miller writes about the company’s humble beginnings and its journey to CBS, as well as its continued growth since the acquisition:
After two years running Last.fm within CBS we feel the time is right to… → Read More
Music service Last.fm, which was bragging about server uptime a week and a half ago, shuts its doors for the afternoon, claiming “datacenter temperature issues beyond our control” required them to go offline. The outage began around 12:30 pm PST, so we’re at two hours and counting. Updates are on their Twitter account. → Read More
A couple of months ago Erick Schonfeld wrote a post titled “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?” based on a source that has proved to be very reliable in the past. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter.
Before posting Erick reached out to the RIAA, Last.fm and parent company CBS for comments. The only response was from CBS – “To our knowledge, no data has been made… → Read More
And so it goes. Last.fm, which just went to a pay-to-play model, is shutting down mobile streaming due to “licensing agreements.” This means unofficial Last.fm scrobbling and streaming apps will now be verboten – although for how long and to what degree are not clear. The service will now cost 3 euros per month to users outside of the UK, US, and Germany and current subscribers… → Read More
Radionomy, based out of Brussels, Belgium (yes we do have a startup scene here), has secured more funding in order to bring more enhancements to and enable scale for its personalized web radio application, which it is debuting in public beta today.
The size of the financing round wasn’t shared in detail, but the startup did say its total capital now exceeds €1.5 million (roughly $2… → Read More
Big Media’s love affair with the Internet ebbs and flows with the markets. When they see money pouring into Web startups, they feel threatened and rush to do the same. They ramp up their digital divisions, which usually are no more than venture arms, and hope to strike it rich. When the markets are down, as they are now, their attention drifts elsewhere—exactly at the time when they can pick… → Read More
Mobile VoIP and IM service fring, one of the more popular mobile communication services around, is experimenting with porting a bunch of third-party apps to the fring client and will be announcing a number of those in the course of this year. Today, fring is launching a custom mobile-optimized Last.fm music radio add-on that brings a lot of the music recommendation service to the fring client but… → Read More
Music recommendation engine / social network Last.fm has launched an official, feature-rich application for the Android platform that enables users to stream radio stations (including personalized streaming radio), consult up-to-date concert information and also offers the ability to track users’ listening habits based on their Last.fm profile.
The company says the application should be available… → Read More
MOG demo’d the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far.
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today… → Read More
Just in via Twitter: Pandora has registered its 20 millionth user. The three-year old music streaming service is trying to hold its own despite tough economics and recent layoffs.
Its music-recommendation engine pumps out personalized radio stations over the Web, and its iPhone app remains one the top free apps on iTunes (currently No. 21). → Read More
Today, CBS Interactive is laying off people across several of its properties, I’ve confirmed with the company. CBS is not saying which divisions or how many people are affected. It is positioning the layoffs as part of the integration process it began six months ago when it bought CNET for $1.8 billion. But it is not just the CNET businesses that are being cut.
I’ve also confirmed that… → Read More
Yesterday, CBS sent out a press release touting the success of Last.fm’s month-old redesign, citing a 20 percent increase in unique visitors and a 36 percent increase in total minutes between June and July. Despite a few bugs on the day of launch, the redesign seems to be paying off. But why is CBS so keen on beating its chest when it comes to Last.fm? Ever since CBS bought Last.fm in May… → Read More
The music industry’s attempts to create its own digital distribution business is like a bad horror movie. It just keeps coming back no matter how badly bludgeoned it gets. Back in 2001 in response to Napster, the music labels launched two competing music download sites, PressPlay and MusicNet (the latter became a white-label music service called MediaNet. Meanwhile, Pressplay was bought by… → Read More
S60 users now have a reason to scream stream thanks to the latest update to mobbler. Version 0.2.1 now includes streaming from Last.fm and ‘scrobbles’ tracks played on your handset to your Last.fm profile. Adonismobile gave the updated app a spin and said: “there is a new interface with some extra controls and menu options, and you have the option of streaming via Wi-Fi or 3G as desired. The… → Read More
Last.fm has a new look today that simplifies the navigation of the main site and makes finding music easier. Or at least, it would make finding music easier if the site wasn’t so buggy. (At least for me. I couldn’t even log in without getting an error. This may be due to fans rushing to check out the new features, or simply poor planning). The new features a library of songs that you… → Read More
Music-streaming service Last.fm is now paying unsigned artists royalties for every song played on its service. Since the company announced the program last January, 170,000 70,000 artists and small music labels have signed up for it and uploaded 450,000 tracks. What Last.fm is doing here is creating an alternative to the official royalty-collecting organization for musicians (i.e., SoundExchange). → Read More
Even on the Web, radio is local. People still tune into their favorite college or hometown radio station from hundreds of miles away. Today’s relaunch of AOL Radio (in beta) embraces that aspect of radio in many ways. First and foremost is its partnership with CBS Radio, which is replacing XM Satellite as the provider of music for 150 radio stations on AOL Radio (AOL itself continues to… → Read More
Sonific, an online music playing servuce similar to Pandora and Seeqpod, is to close May 1 as the company was unable to obtain licensed music rights in a way that made the service viable. Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO writes: 1) There are countless startups providing access to any and all music streams without any license whatsoever. However, when we approached the major record label… → Read More
MyPlayList, a bootstrapped startup from Agentbleu, a Englishman living in France, combines streamed music and Flickr for a free music service that delivers visual as well as musical abundance. MyPlayList uses the XSPF xml format to combine the images from the Flickr image sharing service, with music that is hosted across the internet, and similar to Seeqpod does not host or cache any of the music… → Read More
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