Songs of the Holygrams: Last.Fm is now streaming full songs and albums... FO FREE

To be born again...

...sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again...' Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. 'I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you,' and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, 'To the devil with your tunes,' the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, 'in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now.'

--Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Last.Fm is now streaming full songs and albums... FO FREE

You might notice on the left hand side of the window here, I have posted my Last.FM playlist for all to enjoy. I do this not only as an avenue to share new music with you, but also to advertize one of the best music-related sites on the web. Last.FM brilliantly reccomends songs and albums to you by examining a list of your favorite artists and the music you play though iTunes. However, you were never allowed to search for a specific song and play it online. Instead, you were merely presented with a list of songs which played through automatically.

As of yesterday however, they have upped their ante, allowing their users to listen to songs in the Last.FM library for free. Here is the text from the official Last.FM Blog:

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

Free full-length tracks are obviously great news for listeners, but also great for artists and labels, who get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized. This is good because artists get paid based on how popular a song is with their fans, instead of a fixed amount.

Sign up for Last.FM here