Business News Digital

Last.fm cut off streams to third party apps

By | Published on Thursday 26 March 2009

Last.fm have made their second unpopular announcement in two days, which is pretty good going. On Tuesday, of course, they announced that users outside the UK, US or Germany would have to pay to listen to the site’s radio services from the end of this month. Yesterday, they announced that they were restructuring the way those radio streams work, in order to restrict their use by third party applications.

One of the site’s developers, Russ Garrett says that while they had “tolerated” third party apps using their streams in the past, there are licensing issues which had to be addressed – ie last.fm’s licences from the record companies and publishers don’t allow for the third-party streaming. So, in future, streaming via third party apps will only be available to paying last.fm subscribers, and streaming via mobile networks will be cut off altogether.

However, Garrett did say that exceptions maybe made for some outside developers – presumably any who are willing to foot the licensing costs of running the streams. Licenses for over-the-air content (ie mobile music services) often cost a great deal more than standard internet streaming, so this seems reasonable.

As with Tuesday’s announcement about radio stream subscriptions, there has been a lot of angry shouting from some of the site’s users, but in reality this will not affect many of the 30 million people on the site in any way at all. Radio via the official last.fm player will continue to work as normal, as will the official apps for the iPhone and Android phone.



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