Continuing along a path which has seen Last.FM reduce its features and concentrate on its core asset, the company is ending its subscription streaming radio plan as of April 28. The announcement cited “very difficult decisions” required by a changing music landscape.
Ending the subscription plan affects all devices, from computers to mobile apps to wiFi speaker systems which enable Last.FM, such as Sonos.
You can still listen to music at Last.FM, via its affiliations with YouTube and Spotify. Outsourcing the music eliminated Last.FM’s direct cost of licensing, which is a daunting line item in the balance sheets of many online music services.
Last.FM’s key proprietary asset, called Scrobbler, will continue. Scrobbler is a music intelligence layer that tracks user selections and compares them with data sets belonging to other users, for a kind of auto-crowdsourcing of what you hear next.