Last.fm Starts Paying Royalties to Unsigned Bands - ReadWriteWeb. Online music service Last.fm today announced that it will start paying out royalties to unsigned and independent bands that upload their music to last.fm. Artists will earn royalties whenever their music is played on-demand, or on Last.fm's streaming radio service. Last.fm had first announced this in January, but it took until today for Last.fm to officially start up its Artist Royalty Program. According to Last.fm, artists have uploaded close to half a million tracks since the program was first announced. When uploading a song, all artists can choose to opt into the Royalty Program. So far, Last.fm has been completely ad-supported, though a premium subscription service is currently in beta. Judging from the payout schedule, however, artists will need a lot of plays on Last.fm to make a reasonable amount from the program. Not everybody seems to be happy about this announcement from Last.fm, though.
Last.fm. Who Needs Music Labels? Last.fm Starts Paying Royalties To Unsig. Music-streaming service Last.fm is now paying unsigned artists royalties for every song played on its service. Since the company announced the program last January, 170,000 70,000 artists and small music labels have signed up for it and uploaded 450,000 tracks. What Last.fm is doing here is creating an alternative to the official royalty-collecting organization for musicians (i.e., SoundExchange). Last year, the royalty rates for music streamed over the Internet were raised, making it more difficult for ad-supported music startups to stay in business. Last.fm got bought by CBS, so it’s not in danger of going under. By cutting out the middlemen (labels, SoundExchange), Last.fm claims that artists that sign up for the program will receive more than twice the royalty rate they would see if the same song played on commercial radio.
We’re not talking a lot of money here, a few fractions of a penny per song. Update: Last.fm is offering tiered royalty rates. Free Music Encourages Sales, Says Last.fm - ReadWriteWeb. Today, Last.fm is announcing some stats on their free streaming radio service and its impact on music sales. Contrary to what the labels would have you believe, it appears that free music is, in fact, good for the industry, leading to increased revenue for Last.fm's partners, like Amazon and iTunes, who are benefiting from January's launch of the site's free on-demand music service.
Last.fm's on-demand service, which lets users play any particular song, only allows a user to stream a song in full three times. After which, they're prompted to purchase the track through one of the affiliate services. Getting Prompted to Buy on Last.fm Not only has this on-demand service been good for Last.fm - minutes spent on site are up 118% month-on-month - the service is good for partners, too, like Amazon, whose overall CD and download sales through Last.fm increased by 119%. And since the service launched, Last.fm users are purchasing 66% more albums than before. TuneGlue° | Relationship Explorer. Last.fm Normaliser. Top 10 Last.fm Mashups - ReadWriteWeb. Last.fm is generally acknowledged to be one of the best web apps of this era - its music recommendation system literally creates a personalized radio station for you. But the now CBS-owned service doesn't get nearly enough credit for its API.
We've heard stories about how 90% of Twitter's use comes from its API. Well, Last.fm also has an API that is used by many external services to add value for end users. In this post we list 10 of our favorites, but there are many more of them to explore. Last.fm API Background First some context. At a high level, this is what Tom Coates was refering to last week at Webstock as the Web of data. 1. A very slick Ajax powered search engine that delivers videos, photos, blog entries, albums and other info about a particular music artist. 2. TokyoStage mashs up music charts, Youtube, LastFM, and LyricWiki. 3. 4. musicmesh Lets you explore music derived from audioscrobbler by a graph of album covers, which are sourced from Amazon. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.