Change in Funding Model for Lastfm

This post has nothing to do with education. It does consider changes in social networking and the profit potential in new ideas.

I have been a fan of lastfm for more than a year. Lastfm is free (with ads I suppose), but I pay $4 a month. I don’t use most of the features because I am older and not that interested in the social networking opportunities. The technology on the back end interests me a great deal – I like the way the service accumulates data about my habits and attempts to identify what these habits might mean about my taste in music. BTW – the little widget that appears at the end of this blog page is a feed from lastfm.Lastfm was recently sold to CBS and there have been some interesting changes. The most noticeable is the opportunity to play entire tracks (rather than the standard 30 second track offered as a preview by services such as iTunes). There is a limit on how many times you can do this for a given song (3 I think). The idea is to give you a better opportunity to make decisions about purchases.