Digital Home Thoughts: Last.fm's Free, On-Demand Music Could Reshape Radio

"In what may later be recorded as a milestone development in the music industry, CBS-owned Last.fm has reached a deal with record labels enabling it to stream music of the listener's choice, from its entire library. Last May, analysts were asking what CBS Corporation could possibly want with an online streaming media provider in the UK called Last.fm -- enough to have paid $280 million for it. Today, everyone got his answer. In a radical change not only to this one outlet's business model but potentially to the music industry as a whole, CBS announced it has reached a deal with all four major record publishers and several smaller ones to enable Last.fm to play the listener's choice of music on-demand, for as many as three times per day per song, for no charge. Non-paying listeners will be subsidized through advertising, though as Last.fm continues to promise, not through nagware or spyware."

This is an incredible offering. I wonder what services like Rhapsody or Apple are going to do next in order to compete with a service like one. Well, maybe wait patiently to see how it is adopted may be one tack. Anyways, the other great piece of news is that Last.fm apparently made a private deal with royalties collections firms enabling the artists they represent to be compensated. I think a cool thing that CBS could now do is to work with car companies to get their service integrated in the in-car dash.