Last.fm dumps streaming, focuses on recommendation

Last.fm just made a huge change to its offerings, deciding to let partner services handle on-demand music streaming, while Last.fm focuses on the recommendation and discovery side of its business. It's a big loss for users in the US, UK and Germany, who have been able to listen to plenty of full tracks via Last.fm for the past two years.

So, why the switch?

Last.fm says it's because of the way people actually use the service: mostly, they get their tracks elsewhere and use Last to find out what to listen to next. Recommendation and discovery are the things Last.fm does best, so they've decided to leave the playing to the players, which will include MOG, Spotify, The Hype Machine, We7 and VEVO.

Reading between the lines a little bit, it sounds like Last.fm wasn't getting a big return on the bandwidth costs it was putting out for streaming, especially in an increasingly competitive music app market. At this point, it's probably a smart business move to devote more resources to becoming the best damn music discovery resource on the planet, instead of yet another streaming music provider. And of course, this means that anything you play on these partner sites will "scrobble" to Last.fm and count in your listener data.