Music Industry Finally Gets It Right?

I doubt it, but this is a good sign.

Last.fm, a digital music network owned by CBS, is introducing a free music streaming service. The new service is being launched in partnership with four major music companies and over 150,000 labels and artists.

Users can search for a specific artist or song on the Last.fm site or enter a favorite artist and let the application choose similar artists and songs.  The music is then streamed over the internet for free (funded by ad revenue of course) in a browser based music player:

You can also pay to download MP3’s and free downloads are occasionally offered as well.

CBS paid $280 million for Last.fm which has been best known for its song-recommendation system, “scrobble”. By downloading an application, users can also form communities or networks around their favorite artists (much like social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace).

The download version also includes Skype and iPod support.

Free music streaming and Internet radio sites have typically struggled with high music revenue fees. Pandora, for instance is shutting down in most of the world for this very reason. Since Last.fm is a music community it is hoped that the page views will be higher than a traditional webcaster like Pandora and thus be able to generate enough ad based revenue to cover fees.

Since I’ve been waist deep in digitizing CD’s lately, I haven’t used Pandora as much as I once did but I hate to see it struggle. On the brighter side, Last.fm is every bit as good as Pandora and, as a first impression, maybe even better. It’s song and artist recommendation seems to work a bit better at least.

It’s too bad the short-sighted recording industry didn’t jump on this six or seven years ago. You know, actually cooperate with digital music providers? I guess they’ve been to busy harassing their own customers with spyware and lawsuits.