I have been trying out Rhythmbox, which comes with Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha,
and discovered that it was possible to tune in to Last.fm. It was a nice
feature of the default (I think?) media player to do so, but I still
liked the web radio and podcast feature more.
According to http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement the service
Last.fm will cost money for users not located in Germany, UK and
US. Just what you need in the era of the internet, geographical
restrictions on a service that don’t seem like it need to be
restricted. The announcement does not say why it should not be free any
more, or why users from the three countries don’t need to subscribe, and
I immediately deleted my account. Because I don’t believe in treating
people differently based on seemingly false/wrong reason. If they
figured out that 3 Euro from some percentage of 30 million users will
make them a lot of money, why not make 3 Euro of 100 percent of their
users? It would be a crying shame if they are trying to make money of
every country except the top three to prevent a massive
account-cancellation-storm.
So, back to services like radio and Jamendo, I won’t miss you Last.fm.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:03 am
Welcome to Australia!
…Everybody not in the US wishes they had Hulu. I want to buy a month of VPS time (turning 18 soon so I can get a credit card so I can sign up!) to see if the VPN/Proxy performance is decent.
It is total crap. And you are right – in the end we don’t miss services like Last.fm and they can go to hell for all we care.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
It’s not an ideal situation when someone have to resort to workarounds, not when there is no real need to do so. If the content providers want to reach a large audience, they must understand that blocking someone because they live on the wrong side of some border, is just stupid.
Is the only way we can send a message, to not consume the content? I can’t see a good solution to this problem.