Streaming Radio: Last.fm Silences Third-Party Mobile Apps:
Hot off an announcement that they’d be charging for radio access outside the US, UK and Germany, Last.fm has said that all non-official mobile clients will be banned. This isn’t going over well.
The spoiled-child POV is that this sux because they’re dix! But really this is nothing but good in the long run. When companies stop pretending to pay the bills, they help the market to become rational. Either they can afford the bill and should pay it or they can’t afford it and shouldn’t incur it. They have realized that they can’t afford it and aren’t going to incur it any more. Credit executive leadership at Last.fm.
As you could imagine, this kind of blows for a lot of people. Windows Mobile users will no longer be able to use Pocket Scrobbler, Symbian folks will have their beautiful baby, Mobbler, ripped from their hands, and BlackBerry owners will soon find FlipSide, a pay app, rendered silent.
To the Pocket Scrobblerers, Mobblerers and FlipSiders I say: there’s no substitute for real freedom. If some vendor is generous or forgetful enough to cover your bills, all you can say is thank you. And if /when the free ride runs out, just say thank you.
I haven’t decided how I feel about last.fm’s series of moves. On one hand my son tells me that last has been invaluable in his discovery of new, old and especially “underground” music (as he identifies it).
On the other hand I am blindly and bitterly prejudiced against CBS but also find it difficult to give them credit when they are so deeply embedded in the corrupt, gouging, pre-internet archaic licensing system.
Regarding the 3rd party hackers who made mobile plugins, my understanding is that they were using undocumented URLs they scraped from the site. If that’s true then I have zero sympathy for them or their users. hack+entitlement=loser
CBS is very pre-internet. They are all about swinging the vast bulk of their pre-internet ass up onto the deck of the internet. Like Jabba the Hut but slightly more nimble.
…butttt but but. My understanding, and it’s certainly the impression given by Lsast itself, is that CBS is not interfering in the day to day business of Lasat. Ultimately, they were independent for as long as they really could be, and nowthey need to rationalise their business model.
Speaking as a long (and I mean looooong) term subscriber to Last, and to Flickr, and other really brilliant and wonderful things that I love and wish to support with my hard earned wages, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for users who want it all to remain free.
I realise this is not a particularly fsahionable opinion , but you know. Get real, you freeloadaing idiots! (Heh).