I have been using Last.fm for some time now. I did take a break from the service for a period of time but have been back using it full time for most of this year and now I have an even better reason to keep using it. According to Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch Last.fm is now paying the unsigned artists royalties for their songs played by Last.fm members. Granted we are only talking about fractions of a penny per song but as more and more people begin to use Last.fm on a regular basis this could add up for the independent musicians taking part.
As Erick says in his post [nw] on this news
By cutting out the middlemen (labels, SoundExchange), Last.fm claims that artists that sign up for the program will receive more than twice the royalty rate they would see if the same song played on commercial radio. That’s because the money goes directly to the artist. (The total royalty, though, is less than what it pays SoundExchange). The royalty that Last.fm is paying unsigned artists is equivalent to 10 percent of the advertising revenues associated with their songs. Musicians get a quarterly check, and can withdraw the money once it reaches $10.
While this might be news to cheer about Frederic over at ReadWriteWeb points out [nw] that not everyone is overly happy with the announcement
Not everybody seems to be happy about this announcement from Last.fm, though. Merlin, the “the world’s first global rights body for independent music,” which represents close to 8% of the US music market, has issued a statement to its roughly 12,000 members, telling them that Last.fm has failed to address its concerns about copyright infringement on Last.fm. Merlin also argues that the license terms of the Royalties Program are too ambiguous
Personally I am glad to see this kind of involvement in helping the indie artist get paid for their work and yes I realize that Last.fm is owned by CBS so some might see this as self-serving. For me though this move by the music service is just another good reason to keep on using them. Now if they could just add a way for me to buy the music I like using PayPal I’d be a real happy camper.
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