If they are able to offer the service for free to some, why is this a bad thing again? I'm Canadian, so am a little bit sad that I won't be enjoying last.fm for free (or, in my case, at all) anymore. However, I'm not mad that others will be able to.
And why is it a bad thing if you offer your service for free at first?
It's bad because the expectation you set with your users is that that service is free.
With last.fm, it was free, but you could upgrade if you wanted to. Until this point in time, it wasn't "free, but only if you're from the right country". Had that been stated in the beginning, they wouldn't have been as successful and probably wouldn't have been acquired by the CBS.
They basically did the worst thing possible. They've collected user data, which they needed for their recommendation engine. They got users to fill out information about the bands whose music was on the site. Now, they're cashing in.
As DHH and 37signals and various other people have said: Don't be afraid to charge for your product.
They screwed up and now they will face the wrath of the community.
Wait, so you would've been willing to pay for the product originally (which, as you mentioned, would've collected less data and therefore be less useful than todays Last.fm), but you wouldn't be willing to pay for the more useful version available today?
For all that information, you got personal statistics (which will still be free) and free radio for seven years.
They're a business, it is there _responsibility_ to cash in. I'd much rather have it available for a price, than not available because people ran it into the ground.
What I'm saying is that the expectation that you, as a user, will have to pay for the service at some point in the future, but only if you don't happen to live in their preferred countries, was not set at launch of the service. If that expectation had been set, of course it would have amounted to a less useful service.
This is tantamount to a bait-and-switch, only you as a user provided the bait. All I'm arguing here for is transparency. None of this was needed had they been transparent. It would have also helped if they asked the community for feedback.
Now, the admins basically come off as assholes who have used the community and their volunteer contributions to make a coin. Making money isn't the problem. How they've gone about doing it is.
By the way, take a look at the comments again. No one from last.fm has responded to the users in the last 5 hours and the last comment was no better than a canned reply.
It's terrible customer service. Even if I weren't affected, I'd consider removing my data and getting off the service. Who's to say they won't do it to US, UK and German users next?
Maybe it is. Putting aside the fact that this is a major change in the business model, the admins still have not responded to the furor.
They gave a 5 day notice, they haven't put it on Last.fm's home page and they haven't assuaged users' fears. That is still a terrible way to treat the community who has basically provided the information the service needed in order to be as good as it is.
I don't think that that is presumptuous to expect of them.
Yeah. It's not a zero-sum game: on the Internet, people can see more and access more, and they can do it quickly and more effectively than they could in the past. So everybody wins.
A sort of related anecdote: one time I was on a plane where there was some sort of medical emergency in the back, so we had to wait to let paramedics get on. Eventually they had the patient stabilized but needed to do more work before he could be moved, so they allowed the plane to be unloaded as long as the aisles could be cleared quickly if they needed to get through. In order to allow this, the crew only let one row at a time to stand up. I wish I would've timed how long it took, but it was definitely much shorter than the time it usually takes to get off when there is no organization.
The SantaMail is in the funny one to me. In Canada, if you mail a letter to Santa Claus, North Pole, H0H 0H0 then Canada Post employee volunteers send you a response in the guise of Santa. And the only cost to you is stationary and a stamp.
And why is it a bad thing if you offer your service for free at first?