Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Luckily internet services abound for discovering, trying, and buying new music. Unfortunately, your choices can be a little overwhelming, not all tools fit your needs, and few of them actually integrate with one another. Here's how to work new music into your life in a post-MP3 age, from discovering it to integrating it into your library."

Discovering new music and artists is one of the real joys of life. If you're like me, you may get frustrated from time to time when you hear a song while driving, working, or otherwise focusing on an activity that is not the music itself and wonder who the artist is and what the name of the song is. Often, before you figure it out, it's gone. You may also be spending some time exploring music on the web or on conventional radio or satellite radio, and find that it's a tedious, non-scientific, endeavor. Fortunately, with a little planning and experience, you can leverage all kinds of music resources, tools, and repositories, and experience that wonderful feeling of finding a great song. Lifehacker has put together a three-step process for effectively exploring the world for music using present-day options: discovering music you like, on-demand streaming, and buying. If music is a big part of your life, read this posting and take advantage of the options available to us these days.

"Not a big surprise here. Last.fm is announcing that their ad-supported model, like the one used on their website, does not work on mobile and connected home entertainment devices. As such, Last.fm will switch to a premium subscription model — with higher quality audio — that will charge users $3/mo to access the service"

Listen up everybody! Today's word is "Freemium". Many successful businesses seem to be finding a home with that business model. Pandora seems to be doing well with it. Google has several services that follow that structure. Zynga's entire existence depends on it. Now it seems that Last.fm joined in on the fun. With ads not always working for all delivery devices, it makes sense that they have to offset costs through other means. All that we really need now is a service that will manage our various subscriptions to the bazillion different Internet services we use. Perhaps Mint.com will offer a premium paid service to do that.

"Last.fm, the social media site acquired by CBS last May, now lets users play any song from the Big Four record labels and thousands of indie labels and artists up to three times, for free. At a press conference at CBS' headquarters Wednesday, executives revealed plans for Last.fm to become "the first website to offer free, global, on-demand access to the largest licensed catalog of music." CBS president and CEO Leslie Moonves kicked off what he called a "groundbreaking" announcement by saying that the company had wondered, "Could this culture meld with our culture? And I'm pleased to say it did.... Community is clearly the future.""



This is a great way to listen to full songs in a try before you buy scenario. As the article alludes to, a pairing with a MP3 music store could work out nicely. Right now there is no login requirement, but I bet that changes soon, since as the author noted, simply deleting your cookies (which lots of people do on a regular basis) resets the three listen count.