Jenn told me about this site that sounded really cool.  A place called Last FM that offered music streaming online for those unfortunates who can’t access an MP3 player or download things, like podcasts, to their workstations.

I just spent the day playing with the site.  It definitely looked like time WELL wasted, and it wasn’t until the bitter end that I discovered it was not.  At least, not for me.  I’ve downloaded the software, let it snoop into my music library, add things that I’ve listened to during the day on WinAmp and looked forward to using it.

In addition I went through and started tagging music.  The site says to do this.  Tag your favorite artists to make playlists and listen to them any time.  I spent most of the day tagging artists.  I got really excited because not only were the Brobdingnagian Bards on the site, but so was a lot of Marc Gunn’s other work (more on both in later posts) and a bunch of other hard to find filk and bard music.  So by now I have four categories of tags, ranging from comedy to rock and decide that I want to listen to the various category that I set up.  I want to listen to the Bards and the filk and the various score composers I found.

I get a notice that you have to be subscribed and therefore can’t listen to my tagged artists.  Subscribed? But that makes no sense, everything said FREE.  I already created an account, I’m logged in, and maybe it’s just a glitch?  I go from the desktop application to the website and try again.  Only to be taken to a subscription page.

At this point, I’m livid, I’d already praised Jenn for finding such a cool site and recommended it to Nick (Flippant).  Being that I review things that are good for wasting time with, much of which someone can multi-task to, I’m in the habit of reading fine print.  The print was so fine that it was concealed at the bottom of the main page, at the very bottom below where all the important links about contact and job options are at.

While looking at what Tags were and why they were worth doing for this site I found jack fiddly about having to SUBSCRIBE to listen to my tags.  No, the charge isn’t much, it’s three bucks American a month, grand total of thirty-six dollars for a year.  Right now they’re in a beta mode for the free service, which doesn’t read like it will stay free forever (at least it read that way to me).  Disappointing, immensely disappointing, particularly because I had a hard time finding out there would ever be subscriptions involved.

Outside of my general outrage and the thought that they should be a bit more forthright about it being/becoming a subscription based service it’s a nice service.  It’s got an excellent catalog of music, but I should have known free was too good to be true when I saw the extensive Beetles catalog.

Will I subscribe in the future?  I admit I might; when I don’t have better things to spend my money on, like compact discs and MP3s that I can buy once and listen to for the rest of my life without worrying about a rate hike.  I’ll certainly look for the fine print a bit harder in the future.

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