Last.fm - Sharing ad revenue, whats the story?

Last.fm announced their revenue sharing program that allows unsigned artists to get a share of last.fm’s ad revenue. There has been a lot of discussion on blogosphere about it, here are two of the differing schools of thought.

The first says, its a ground breaking program that will help a lot of unsigned artists to get some cash to continue their work.

Since providing unsigned artists with the option to join the Artist Royalty Program in January, over 450,000 tracks have been uploaded to Last.fm and offered for free-on-demand streaming.

The second opinion was voiced on the register where it was reported that artists and some of the indie labels are complaining about the lack of transparency about the revenue shares.

Last.fm doesn’t pay most independents, and where it does, you’d need a microscope to see the royalties.

We think that indie musicians should use an excellent service like Last.fm independent of whether Last.fm’s revenue share gives them a decent amount of money or not. After all, the exposure that Last.fm can bring to an independent artists is almost as big as that on MySpace, if not more.

The biggest pro in favour of using Last.fm is that an artist’s music can be ‘accidentally’ discovered by listeners. And that is a big boon for artists working on increasing their exposure. This discovery mechanism though can be found on a lot of other services like Pandora (US only), and Imeem.

The revenue from Last.fm, if good, is then just an icing on the cake. And with last.fm taking the lead, I am sure other services will have to provide some means of revenue sharing too.

What we’d love to see though is these services providing a way for fans to ‘give something back’ to the artists. We are sure the day is not far though.