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| Last.fm to allow free streaming of all entire albums; will pay royalties. |
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| posted by Andrew Aversa on Thursday January 24 2008 @ 09:06AM PST |
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http://blog.last.fm/2008/01/23/free-the-music
Last.fm, which is currently a digital distribution partner with CD Baby (so many of you will probably already have your music uploaded there) has announced a number of partnerships with major labels which has enabled them to "free the music". Any user can now go to last.fm and listen to single tracks or even entire albums for free, in normal quality. Users can listen to any track up to three times, after which they will need to peruse last.fm's upcoming subscription service to access unlimited plays.
If you uploaded your music to last.fm yourself, you will need to set up who is authorized to collect royalties on your behalf, or you will not be paid (this person might simply be you.) If your music is on there thanks to CD Baby, CD Baby will collect on your behalf.
In my opinion, considering the vast popularity of last.fm and the fact that all this music can be accessed straight off the website with no special software, plugins, or exchange of credit card info, this is a HUGE development!
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The real problem is that It seems that for 5$ there is need for 10000 plays, so, It's a way to pay without pay ;))
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A complete fraud in every way.
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I'm not impressed with the site. They have us mixed up with another band and have our music with their photo.
Our Amazon link takes you to yet someone elses music too
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Oh yeah, they did that do us too. A complete deluded mess.
They don't care what they send you to as they make affiliate credit
with the Amazon links. They could care less about your music.
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last.fm is clearly the most unorganized and lamest music site.
Mainly do the fact that they allow wiki-trolls to screw with your
profile, and when you try to make it accurate, they live and
breathe retaliation. Same troll-fest from wikipedia, which sucks
to begin with.
I took the time to upload 5 cds, video, images and fixed the bio.
All of which I pulled within 24 hours. I see that we have not
made a dime from them anyway, so, I say delete it all. There is
no need for last.fm. It's a useless entity.
And no, they never replied to my complaint about the wiki-
trolls.
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Well what a big mess. If they pay for streaming how will they know what is going on and who is who????
We have been using our name since 1980, but others are using it now too.
What kind of BS is this about having to share a profile?
Thank God they are the only site I've come across doing this.
From their TOS re: Artists with the same name
It is currently not possible to disambiguate artists with the same name, which means that if an artist shares their name with at least one other artist, they will have to share one Last.fm artist profile.
Please note that any other valid artist with the same name has the equal right to appear on such a shared profile, including their music, their pictures, their artist description and any other information on them.
It is for instance not allowed to remove their description from the wiki (for more information about what a wiki about more than one artist with the same name should look like, please see this FAQ), and it is also not possible to have an official primary image for one artist, while there are other pictures for the other artist(s) which all users can vote for and thus decide which one of the artists should get the "main" image.
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Oh Geez, I went in and edited the bio and changed the profile photo because they weren't ours
But now after reading more of the TOS, it looks like
I'm in violation of some assinine rules and will get booted.
What a joke.
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I have found out that all four Elena Kuschnerova's CDs on CD Baby (that I take care of) had been sent to last.fm, where one can listen to all complete tracks in a good quality. I am listening and listening and the system does not tell me to subscribe.
Who has authorized this giveaway?? How this extremely unprofessional site can be a partner of CD Baby?? We are not receiving a penny from them, of course, it looks like a complete fraud. They call composers "artists" and it is impossible to find recordings of, say, Brahms, on their site. This is good, though, since nonpaying listeners cannot find Elena's recordings in this way.
I will now write to CD Baby asking them to remove our CDs from last.fm.
Dmitry
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I would like to clarify some things with you all regarding Last.fm, they're not really a bad
company, CD Baby wouldn't negotiate a deal with someone that we don't trust!
All of our albums are distributed there too, ya know :)
Anyhow, for a while now, Last.fm has worked quite a bit like the internet radio station Pandora,
where you can go to their site, type in an artist name/genre and they will play music from that
artist and similar artists (using a complex computer algorithm). Internet radio stations are
required to limit the amount of user interactivity when their users are playing music. For
example, they can't play the song you specifically ask for over and over. However, the rates they
are required to pay out are very small... like $.0009
Additionally, Last.fm is starting an On Demand Service (like Rhapsody) where a customer can
subscribe to an ungraded Last.fm Account with a monthly charge and then are able to stream
(on-demand) any songs on Last.fm that are approved for this upgraded service. If a customer
streams one of your songs (that CD Baby has delivered to them) you will get a share of the
amount collected that month for subscription services (very similarly to Rhapsody).
We spent a lot of time negotiating the best deal we could with Last.fm for our artists, insuring
that at least something comes in from the subscription sales.
As for Dmitry's comment, I just tested listening on Last.fm, and it worked just as it should have.
I listened to the first track by Nervous and the Kid 3 times, and when I went in for a fourth listen,
a message popped up:
"We’re sorry, but you’ve reached the limit for free plays of Nervous and the Kid – Stoned Ponies."
Last.fm is a really popular service these days, especially for the younger crowd, so if you have a
younger audience I would recommend staying up there. Sure, people can listen to a few tracks
for free, but exposing your music to people is a very important thing!
Think of it as sending a finished CD and one-sheet to a record label or radio station. Or adding
songs to your Myspace page for people to listen to.
:-)
- Lindsey
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I just went to Last.fm and listened to some songs 4 times. Instead of getting a "limit" message, it reduced the song from full to just a 30 second sample on the 4th listen.
However, I found a loophole in that if you don't play the entire song through, it doesn't count towards the listen tally (though I only played about 10 seconds of each song... I didn't test beyond that). You could also probably clean out your cache. I'm not too worried about that, though, because anyone who plays the system like that isn't going to be buying anything anyway, and at least this way you'll make a fan. I know I've now gone back and bought all kinds of music that I'd once gotten for free though questionable means.
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| NOTE: If you need a reply you should email CD Baby directly instead of posting here. We don't often read old message board postings, and have no way of replying to them!
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