{"id":122,"date":"2009-03-25T18:29:55","date_gmt":"2009-03-25T16:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/2009\/03\/25\/lastfm-to-start-charging-for-their-radio-streaming-service\/"},"modified":"2009-03-25T18:29:55","modified_gmt":"2009-03-25T16:29:55","slug":"lastfm-to-start-charging-for-their-radio-streaming-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/2009\/03\/25\/lastfm-to-start-charging-for-their-radio-streaming-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Last.fm to start charging for their radio streaming service"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday Last.fm announced<\/a> important changes in their radio streaming service.<\/p>\n

The most obvious one is that from now on users will have to pay a monthly fee of \u20ac3.00 to continue using their radio stations (except in Germany, the USA and the UK, where the service will remain free).<\/p>\n

This is sad news for all Last.fm users (and music lovers in general) as it appears to be a consequence of the licensing agreements that Last.fm has with labels and the royalties they have to pay on streaming music (this article<\/a> from last month gives some details on this).<\/p>\n

Besides this, a post in one of the Last.fm forums<\/a> adds a couple of things:<\/p>\n

    \n
  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.<\/li>\n
  2. Streaming music to mobile phones will not<\/em> be permitted (a comment in the same thread<\/a> explains that this restriction applies only<\/em> to phones, so Nokia tablets are not affected).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The new API and its details haven’t been published yet, and I don’t know how this could affect open source clients.<\/p>\n

    My plans are to continue using Last.fm (since I still think it’s a great service) and to keep working on Vagalume<\/a>, but right now the future is uncertain so we’ll have to wait for a few weeks to see how all this ends up.<\/p>\n

    Update 25 Mar 2009 18:16:03 +0100<\/b>: Rob Taylor<\/a> asked about open source clients and the answer is that Open source apps can apply for an API key at the moment, and that won’t change<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Update 28 Mar 2009 16:57:16 +0100<\/b>: It had already been said in the initial post, but another comment in the same thread confirms that you need a subscriber account to be able to use third-party clients<\/a>, even if you’re in the UK, US or Germany.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Yesterday Last.fm announced important changes in their radio streaming service. The most obvious one is that from now on users will have to pay a monthly fee of \u20ac3.00 to continue using their radio stations (except in Germany, the USA and the UK, where the service will remain free). This is sad news for all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,9,10,11,6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-gnome","category-gpul","category-igalia","category-maemo","category-music","category-free-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/berto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}