Dave Haynes

Image via Wikipedia

It was reported over the weekend that Warner Music Group (WMG) has pulled out of Last.fm. For clarification, that means it has pulled their music from the on-demand streaming service that is just one part of Last.fm’s service. The dispute appears to revolve around the fact that Last.fm are not paying enough money per stream. However, the conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether their decision to pull out and play hardball was made a lot easier by the fact that WMG is an investor in US-based rival Imeem and is about to put in a second round of financing.

I use Last.fm almost everyday and love the service but despite a small amount of disappointment that Warner looks to be taking the first move in a mutually unbeneficial battle my strongest feeling (from a personal user perspective) is one of ‘Warner’s loss, not mine’.

I could be wrong but I don’t think I’ve ever streamed a Warner track on demand from Last.fm and I don’t envisage that I would want to in the near future. What a lot of people miss and what I’ve tried to explain to friends when championing the service is that for me almost 90% of value of Last.fm is the data it allows me to store about the music I’ve played and the music my friends have played. I use that data on a number of different services to broadcast my musical tastes and to help serve me with better recommendations and personalized services based around those tastes.

If I want to stream a track online I’ll either do so on Napster, from my online music locker, or from Songza / HypeMachine / Seeqpod. There’s several on-demand streaming services to choose from and I’m sure we’ll see more emerge in the next year or so, but what makes Last.fm unique and so valuable to me is my data.