Radio Stations
Last.fm offers customized virtual "radio stations" consisting of uninterrupted audio streams of individual tracks selected from the music files in the music library.
Stations can be based on the user's personal profile, the user's "musical neighbors", or the user's "friends". Groups based around common interests or geography also have radio stations if there are enough members, and tags also have radio stations if enough music has the same tag. Radio stations can also be created on the fly, and each artist page allows selection of a "similar artists" or "artist fan" radio station. As of May 2009, Last.fm introduced Visual Radio, an improved version of last.fm radio. This brought features such as an artist slideshow and combo stations, which allows for listening to stations consisting of common similar artists of up to either 3 artists or 3 tags.
Under the terms of the station's "radio" license, listeners may not select specific tracks (except as previews), or choose the order in which they are played, although any of the tracks played may be skipped or banned completely. The appropriate royalties are paid to the copyright holders of all streamed audio tracks according to the law in the UK. The radio stream uses an MP3 stream encoded at 128 kbit/s 44.1 kHz, which may be played using the in-page flash player or the downloaded Last.fm client, but other community-supported players are available as well as a proxy which allows using a media player of choice.
On 24 March 2009, Last.fm announced that Last.fm Radio will require a subscription of €3.00 per month for users living outside the US, the UK, and Germany. This change was to take effect on March 30, but was postponed until April 22. The decision resulted in over 1,000 comments, most of them negative, on the Last.fm blog.
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