This morning, as I was tuning into last.fm I found two things that cought my attention. First, listening to a radio station now requires that you have a member account and that you are logged in. Not that I didn’t already have one, but being forced to log-in to listen to any random radio station is completely new to me. Then, when the radio started, a second thing hit me. To the right of the music player there is a box that says that I can only listen to 30 songs for free as a trial, but need to sign up for a plan for $3 per month to listen to more than these 30 songs. Now, that is something I cannot take as easily as setting up an account, i.e. logging into my existing one. Good thing there are a bunch of other great music services out there.

Update:

As I was testing Last.fm when I was in Switzerland last weekend, I was wondering whether the same occurs when I use the service from Germany. Nope. It seems they are testing out the subscription model in selected countries.