Last.fm starting to play full tracks
The music service Last.fm, which acts as you own personal MP3 player has never been quite as good as it could. The problem being that it could only play 30 seconds of tracks by more popular artists. That was until now, well, as of Wednesday. “As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.” You can only play it 3 times before you have to pay for it, which seems to me to be more than fair to all involved and is a model made possibly by the support of all four major labels. The subscription service hasn’t launched yet but when it does it will allow you unlimited listening. It’s all very exciting, it seems that the major labels are basically adopting a number of different models, essentially allowing people to consume music in the way they best want to consume it. Fair enough really.
In other music news, Yahoo! is also going to be giving away DRM-free music and perhaps unsurprisingly, CD sales are slumping while digital download sales are growing, but not growing enough.