A posting on Michael Kamleitner’s blog once again brought to my attention last.fm’s subscription model. Next to Flickr and Diigo, last.fm is one of the rare services I actually use daily. And apart from Flickr, there is no webservice I’m actually paying money for.

The question is, why change that by paying 2,50€/month for last.fm? Well, here are the reasons given by last.fm:

Subscription Benefits

1. Blue icon status
   Trade your grey user icon in for a blue one.
2. No ads
   You won’t see them; visitors to your page won’t see them. No one will, because they won’t exist.
3. Recent Visitors
   See who’s been visiting your profile page.
4. Personal radio paradise
   Turn your profile page and tags into a portable radio station you and others can listen to from anywhere. It’s like a smart playlist for the music you’ve tagged.
5. Share the Love
   Your “Loved Tracks” become a listenable radio station for you and others.
6. Red carpet treatment
   Get top priority with our webservers and radio servers at peak traffic times.
7. Top secret beta access
   Be the first to know and try what we’re working on and help shape the development of the site. You’ll see a subscriber-only announcement during beta.

Well, here’s what I think:

1. The Blue icon really does have me sold already. That’s it, I’m buying!
2. That I like. Even though, quite frankly, certain Firefox plugins take care of that already.
3. That I like as well. I love knowing who’s been checking out my sexy music collection, so that’s worth at least, say, 0,5€.
4. This is it, that’s one reason that’ll make me pay, if I decide to. The current radio limitations for unpaid members are a drag.
5. That’s where the last.fm marketing guy cheated a bit. Because, actually, that’s part of the above point. Still worth 0,5€.
6. Considering that the last.fm website is sometimes so slow, it makes a snail look fast (pretty good image, right? witty even), this one is worth the 2,50€ alone.*
7. You know me, I like me a bit of secret betas once in a while. I can’t really say how much that is worth, as I haven’t ever paid for access to betas (it’s unfinished software after all), but I’ll give it a symbolic 0,1 €. *Selling tolerable speed is actually a bit cheeky. Not able to scale your service? Not my problem. In the end though, you won’t get more speed by complaining, so you might as well hand over those 2,5€.

Well, after this lengthy and thorough analysis, a last.fm subscription actually adds up to 6,1€. Which is considerably more than 2,5€, in case you haven’t noticed.

So, teleologically speaking, a last.fm subscription is worth it. Which of course doesn’t mean I’ll buy it, but at least I won’t feel like a total ass once I do.

Any subjective opinions out there as well? Leave them in the comments!

Update: I just ventured forth and subscribed for a month. Doing is better than blogging, as the old saying goes. I’ll see how I like it.