International Law

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson explains why Last.fm's free music won't replace your music collection:

Can music companies compete against "free"? Sure they can; it's an issue I addressed in yesterday's feature on the changing nature of the music business, and confirmation came today from the oldest of old-guard sources, CBS. The company, which owns Last.fm, announced today that Last.fm will now offer on-demand streaming of millions of tracks from all four major labels and a huge host of indies. For free.

The business model is ad-supported, with a subscription offering also slated to come online once the current beta test has wrapped. Labels make their music available for streaming, they get paid each time a track is played, and everyone wins. But Last.fm has also opened the system to indies and even unsigned acts; anyone band with a music track to its name can create an artist account, upload content, and start getting paid (if they can convince anyone to listen).

Most exciting is that the free streaming actually works. This is more surprising than it might seem; Lala tried a similar strategy last year using tracks from only one label and instantly found itself swamped beneath the crush of requests. Last.fm's service, despite its worldwide popularity and the launch of the new feature, has been quite responsive in our testing today and delivers on its promise: you press play, and the music blasts forth a few seconds later.

The new service is available to residents of the US, UK, and Germany, though more countries are planned soon.

Unfortunately, there are the inevitable drawbacks.

...

The move is another step forward for a music business in search of new models for making money off its tunes, but it won't replace your personal music library. The biggest problem is that you need an Internet connection and the ability to load Last.fm at any time. While that's fine for laptops, it doesn't work out well for portable media players. Since the player applet is crafted in Flash, we weren't able to use the service on the iPhone, either.

 

Read more here.