Last.fm is a very popular service amongst music listeners, providing social networking type functions to a website that tracks the songs you listen to. You may also be aware that you can listen to any song you like using the service, an option that may be beginning to cost Last.fm a hefty amount of money. Because of this, Last.fm will start charging international users a fee to use the Radio service.
According to Mashable, the basic functions of the website will remain free, like "scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc." So, what do we mean by international users? Well, if you live in the UK, US, or Germany, you can disregard this entire post. For everybody else, you will need to pay a total of €3.00 (around $4.40 USD) a month so you can continue to get your fix of streamed music.
Last.fm themselves don"t offer any real explanations about this (although it"s implied licensing fees are getting to them), and you can read about the official changes on Last.fm"s blog. If you are not in the three aforementioned countries, you can get a 30 track free trial, but as you can imagine, after that the subscription fee kicks in.
So, what"s the opinion of Neowinians? Will you be happy to pay a fee to continue to get the full functionality of Last.fm, or will you start looking elsewhere for your music?