NEW YORK - Joining a number of leading companies in entering the digital music area online, the CBS owned Last.fm has announced an initiative to allow users to listen to on-demand music free of cost. Last.fm is a so-called social music site and boasts of 20 million unique users on a monthly basis. It was taken over by CBS in May last year.
Last.fm revealed that the music streaming service will be supported by advertising revenues, which will be shared with the music companies. Users in United States, Britain and Germany can either listen to streaming music on Last.fm or pay for downloading their chosen songs at Amazon.com, iTunes or 7 Digital.
Last.fm has signed deals with Universal Music Group, Sony/BMG, Warner and EMI to stream music from their catalogs on its own site. The company said that it also songs from catalogs of has more than 150,000 record labels and artists. Users can listen to any song for free three times, before opting to purchase it.
"We acquired Last.fm because music is one of the best ways to build communities on the internet. Adding such a tremendous collection of content to Last.fm will help it grow by leaps and bounds. The skill set that we're learning along the way will be very important as we build additional online communities around our other world-class content as well," said Leslie Moonves, President and CEO of the CBS Corp.
Another strong feature of the deal is that Last.fm will directly pay artists who do not have a standing agreement with any record label. The new service will be launched today in the US, UK and Germany. The company said that a global rollout will follow shortly.
