lördag 28 Mar 2009, 23:03

I emailed this to the Last.fm office yesterday -thought I'd share it here.
*** *** *** *** ***
I am a Last.fm user from the UK, so not directly
affected by the change, but I am emailing you because I think it is
urgent you consider the alternatives before taking a disastrous step.

I believe that by adopting this policy, you will be signing the death
warrant for Last.fm. You are already losing a lot of goodwill by the way
this policy is being implemented (IMHO, charging everybody would
actually have been better, creating less bad feeling). However, any
compulsory charge will drive users away. Some users will not be able to
afford the 3 euros per month (incomes in many countries are far lower
than in the three countries that remain free), some will not have a
suitable credit card or PayPal account, some will just be put off by the
barrier of having to pay. This, in the long run is likely to reduce
advertising revenue (fewer customers, less value to the advertisers). A
point that has been missed, in discussion about advertising revenues in
particular countries is that many of the brands you are advertising are
global (Nokia, Apple) - maybe this needs to be brought up in
negotiations.

Yes, I realise that we users can still scrobble and get recommendations
without paying, but this removes the point of the service. I have
discovered the music of many new artists on Last.fm, but if all I could
discover were their names I would not have gone on to buy their albums
and gig tickets. Also, with fewer users outside the three main
countries, there will end up being a narrower range of music to
discover, and the site will be less useful to me.

In the long run, I believe the royalties system needs to be changed
completely, but obviously that is not a solution to an immediate
problem. A better solution, at least initially, would have been to
contact all your users appealing for voluntary subscriptions. I have
said that if you did this I would immediately take out a years
subscription (I've paid for the first three months as a gesture, and
would still have paid it at 3 euros). Many users in the three main
countries would do likewise, but it would keep the "entry point" to the
service free and so not create a barrier.

Another area that could be improved is the click-through facility to buy
tracks from affiliates. At the moment, many tracks (e.g.
http://www.last.fm/music/Shuggie+Otis/_/Strawberry+Letter+23 ) offer
only the opportunity to buy from iTunes - I am not able to take
advantage of this (I use Linux, so cannot run the iTunes software) - yet
the track is available from both Amazon and 7Digital.

Please, suspend the plans to implement this on March 30, and look at the
alternatives.