Erstellt am: 26. 3. 2009 - 12:49 Uhr
Today's webtip: last love
Although I tend to play a Grumpy Old Man on TV, in real life I'm a bit of a sentimental fool. Heavy emphasis on the Fool. Nemo had me in Tears, Old Yeller leaves me curled up in a ball, and Wal-E had me all sniffled up as well. I'm still in shock about the fact that a "Married with Children" episode managed to pull my heart strings.
But I never would have imagined that I could be moved to an emotional response over my relationship with a website.
Okay, the news that Last.fm was going to start charging members for access to their radio streams didn't have me crying in my laptop. But reading the blog post about the changes did leave me feel like I had just been kicked in the stomach. By a friend. While I was blindfolded.
Apparently, the licensing costs are getting out of control, and Last.fm (or CBS, their corporate overlords) have decided that listeners outside of the U.S., GB, ad DE are costing them too much money. Not only that, but they don't think they can be bothered to try to set up advertising agreements in any other countries, so the streams are going to cost. 3€. 50 cents more than a monthly membership used to cost.
Don't get me wrong. I understand that money needs to be made. There are bills to pay, hungry little rights agencies that need to be fed, and streaming costs that need to be covered.
But last.fm, like most other social networking sites, was made by us. It's users. Our contributions, our listening data, the tags we set, wiki articles we wrote, recommendations we made, are the things that made last.fm something special. It was the input of all those other listeners that made it so effective at discovering new music for me. Or maybe just providing a stream of stuff that tasted good together.
It was a great platform for indie bands who were getting their songs out and heard on streams squashed between classics and taking new listeners by surprise. Something that worked out well for the band and the listener.
And those are the bands that are going to be hurt by this. The bands that release their music under a Creative Commons license, the ones who were happy to share without making any money off of the digital files, the ones for whom licensing fees are now being collected but not payed out.
They have been pushed off the digital shelves again, as major labels manage to reinstate a kind of scarcity. Since there is no scarcity of musicians or audience, the only scarcity that can be exploited is a scarcity of exposure.
But in the end, this sense of betrayal is just between me and last.fm. It was the listeners and fans that made last.fm worth $280 million to CBS back in 2007, listeners across the planet, not just in the U.S.
In a world where we are coerced into giving up our privacy in so many areas the information we choose to provide becomes much more meaningful. Well, it does for me at least. That's the only way I can explain this otherwise irrational sense of betrayal.
And tomorrow I'm going to go get a life ;)