Last.FM – The effect of moving from free to subscription
I used to be an avid user of Last.FM until they decided that Canada as well as most other nations need to pay for its use because the Last.FM marketing group can’t figure out how to advertise effectively in these markets. Recently, I was doing some research for an unrelated topic, which brought me to this article. The graph from Google Trends caught my eye. I had not used Google Trends yet, so figured I would give it a try.
The question I pondered was if the effect of charging all but 3 countries for monthly access to last.fm had a significant effect on their subscriber base? There were many complaints about the change voiced when the announcement was made, so if the user community truly was upset and was large enough, it could cause a drop in their listening base. Unfortunately, from the perspective of Google Trends this didn’t occur.
They originally announced they would be charging all listeners in countries except the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany on Mar 24, 2009. Last.FM explained the rational behind the change on Mar 30, 2009 – not because they wanted to, but the ‘noise’ generated from customers seemed to force them. Finally, the change was deployed on Apr 22, 2009. The graph above for last.FM is basically the same since April 2008. No apparent change during the announcement and discussion phase, but there is a decline in April 2009 and what might be a trend downwards. I included the same graph for imeem.com to compare against. imeem.com has been in a steady downward trend since July 2008 but I suspect this trend is largely due to the removal of all personal videos and the ability to upload videos, a service that last.FM never offered as far as I know.
Unfortunately, I could not come to a definitive conclusion that the latest downward trend for Last.FM is due to the subscription model. I personally hope it is, but I doubt it. I would actually consider paying for for it, but I am put off by the fact they only charge certain countries. I feel they should either charge everyone or no one. Finally I do not know how much of their userbase was impacted by the change. If you believe Google Trends above, then the change is not significant and Last.FM marketing did their homework well.
