It’s safe to say digital music service Last.fm is going through some big changes in 2014. We wrote about its switch to YouTube as the source for its personal radio service, but now it has a Spotify partnership for fully on-demand music too.
Announced this afternoon, the deal will see Spotify making its catalogue available to Last.fm users in the 55 countries where Spotify has launched: tracks, albums, playlists and recommendations.
Last.fm users will be asked to sign up for a Spotify account, or synchronise their Last.fm profiles with their free or premium Spotify profiles if they’re already using it. Spotify’s player can be launched using play buttons across the site, while any Last.fm page’s tracks can be loaded up as a Spotify playlist and played through Last.fm.
“This collaboration with Spotify brings the together the best qualities of both services, creating a stronger listening and discovery experience for music lovers across the globe,” said Last.fm’s managing director Simon Moran in a statement.
It’s not the first time Spotify and Last.fm have worked together. Last.fm has an app for Spotify’s desktop apps platform which is currently the ninth most popular app in the streaming service’s App Finder.
Meanwhile, Last.fm’s scrobbling feature, which records the songs people play and lets them dig back into that data (and get recommendations based on it) can also be enabled from within Spotify.
The deal provides some fascinating new context for the YouTube announcement though, which was seen widely (including by us) as a way for Last.fm to continue providing its service globally, while handing off the licensing burden to YouTube. That now looks like a simplistic view on what Last.fm is doing, as the CBS-owned company continues its comeback efforts.
Acquired by CBS for $280m in 2007, Last.fm later shut down its radio service in a number of countries in December 2012 “due to licensing restrictions”, while taking its desktop version subscription-only in the US, UK and Germany – the last three markets where it had been free.
The company claims 55m registered users, although in its last set of financial results, Last.fm said it ended 2012 with 23m unique users. Still an impressive total in the streaming scheme of things. Recent Ofcom data suggested that 4% of UK adults use it, behind the 29% for iTunes and 11% for Spotify, but level with Google Play, and ahead of SoundCloud (3%) and Myspace (2%).
As we noted in our piece on the YouTube news, Last.fm is easily underestimated. A music recommendations service integrating Spotify, YouTube AND big data, backed by a big media corporation? If it was brand new, it’d be flavour of the month. As it is, Last.fm’s changes could draw back some of the people who’ve drifted away in recent years, and perhaps attract some new fans too.
