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Goodbye, LastFM - Again

I started using LastFM probably around 6 years ago, and loved its offering. I discovered a huge amount of music I would have never found otherwise.

Then, some time later, it changed its terms of use, and those of us not in some selected countries lost the ability to stream them for free. Bummer.

About one year ago, I decided to purchase a subscription. After all, getting to know new music is always good — And listening to recommendations for friends with interesting music tastes is fun as well!

Of my last music purchases, both in CD and as MP3 downloads (not a spectacular volume, probably some 15 albums in the last year), I can only point to two that I knew the interpreter beforehand. So, we could say I have bought approx. 1 album per month completely thanks to LastFM.

But, as of January 15, they are changing their licensing terms, and LastFM streaming service will no longer be available in Mexico. All it will continue to give me is recommendations based on my listening habits, given I continue “scrobbling” - Much less useful, not to say completely useless given my usual patterns.

So, I’m sadly cancelling my subscription, and quite probably will stop using the service altogether. And yes, this will make me reevaluate freely licensed music services. But while I know of several free music distribution sites such as Jamendo, I will long for this LastFM abililty to deliver me music that is aligned to my current tastes (instead of looking them up by myself)

Any suggestions on where to look for a similar service?

Comments

Anonymous 2012-12-15 07:52:40

magnatune

I’m just going through content on magnatune — pick a genre (although they’re not very good with genres, with a lot of good stuff in “other”), and do an A-Z skipping anything I don’t like and downloading what I do. Not a lot of big-name artists there but the plus is I get more oggs that I can play without an internet connection.


Anonymous 2012-12-16 04:51:43

Grooveshark is pretty good :)

Grooveshark is pretty good :)


Athropos 2012-12-14 08:07:40

I’m facing the same situation

I’m facing the same situation in Switzerland, no more radio.

To be honest, I subscribed mainly because I listen to a lot of music and am a stat freak at the same time. I use the site a lot for this reason, and started being a subscriber maybe 3 years ago just because I like the service they provide.

But for most people, a subscription without the radio is almost useless, and I fear they’ll lose a lot of subscribers. I hope they’ll get through this…


Chrono 2013-02-20 11:44:35

Grooveshark on HTML 5

I have been trying to make work the html5 version of grooveshark but nothing as fixed the issue I have.

I tested the html5 grooveshar with FF, Opera even IE. I can load the queue of song but each song gets skipped.

how do you use html5 version of grooveshark ?

thank you. chrono


Erick 2012-12-14 07:41:34

Alternative to Last.FM

Hello Gunnar,

I used to enjoy last.fm too. I think 1 year ago I switched to grooveshark because I can listen to the music almost anywhere and gives me good recomendations too. You might want to check it out.

Also I know spotify which is better but they don’t give service in Mexico. Some people use proxys to avoid this issue.

have a good day. Erick.


gwolf 2013-02-05 15:00:51

A redux, so far…

Thanks for all of your reccomendations - Right now, I’m using Grooveshark, and it works decently. Even in its experimental HTML5 interface (as I refuse to use the Flashy one).

I will most likely check some others that were suggested here. I have a couple of usability gripes with Grooveshark, so… Well, we shall see :)

Thanks!


gwolf 2013-02-20 17:55:30

Only via Chromium…

I also tried with FF (Iceweasel) to no avail, but it works well with Chromium (and I surely expect to work correctly under official-Chrome). Many features are missing, but it works acceptably.


Luca 2013-02-04 11:23:56

Ya probaste Jango? Es del

Ya probaste Jango? Es del estilo de spotify y no cuesta


mirabilos 2012-12-14 11:19:40

Streams

Hola,

I just listen to music streams and normally do not buy the music. I’ve purchased the VIP membership at live365 point com, who say that they deal with all the GEMA/RIAA stuff and feed some money to the artists of the music I actually listen to. Then I go pick out some stations on that horrid website of theirs and put them into a textfile, with their description and genres. Then, when I’m in the mood, I just run a small script that uses cURL to log in and get the cookie and path, then runs mplayer on it with the station name to give me up to 8 hours of music.

No id3 tags though, so I do not know what song they’re playing (actually, they require that the programme is not known in advance, but you could go to the station page on their website and look up the last few tracks played if you felt like it and dealing with a web2.0 site).

While I’d occasionally like to know what I was hearing just now, and occasionally would really like to vote down one track out of the station’s playlist (which are sometimes real live radio stations, sometimes have just a static or somewhat dynamic playlist (the smallest I saw was a circle repeat of 3 songs, 2 of which were the same by a different interpret), and sometimes something in between), this matches my listening behaviour quite well: I want to listen to “something classical but no Opera” (chorals or something), “instrumental classical”, “something like Nightwish or Edguy” (melodic metal), “something rock/pop”, “something ambient”, “something new age”, … and not care much about the rest, and if I don’t like it, I go on to the next station. And every once in a while, I go to the process of picking out a few more stations.

I don’t know if it would work well for your goal, but maybe.

(And every once in a while I tune in to an actual local radio’s mp3 stream, or some stream someone in IRC told me to try out.)


pehjota 2012-12-14 22:49:39

Libre.fm?

Is Libre.fm one of the “free music distribution sites” of which you know?

Libre.fm is an instance of GNU FM, a free software music community Web site with a Last.fm-compatible API. All of the music on Libre.fm is freely licensed and can be streamed/downloaded to anywhere in the world at no charge (though donations – to support Libre.fm and the artists – are encouraged).


spotify premium code generator 2013-05-14 09:02:00

Magnatune

I’m just going through content on magnatune — pick a genre (although they’re not very good with genres, with a lot of good stuff in “other”), and do an A-Z skipping anything I don’t like and downloading what I do. Not a lot of big-name artists there but the plus is I get more oggs that I can play without an internet connection.


Wolken 2012-12-14 06:46:19

:) Ps yo uso Aupeo, ya de

:)

Ps yo uso Aupeo, ya de unos meses para aca lastFM andaba poniendose muy mamertx con las restricciones, yo no tenia suscripcion, ya que usaba relativamente poco el servicio =) y ahorita aupeo! a servido para mis objetivos malvados. aunque no deja de echarse de menos el poder compartir gustos similares con otros :/ en fin =)


XenGi 2012-12-14 06:49:49

Have you tried Pandora? I

Have you tried Pandora? I love there suggestions and with a tunnel like hotspotshield or a cheap vps in the usa you can use it outside usa too. I’m using it in germany and it works fine.