Today Last.fm announced they’ll be starting an Artist Royalty program “in the near future.” The details of the program are as-of-yet kind of vague (like, how do people get paid?). It has been noted that artists (or publishing rights holders) will only get paid for music that they uploaded to the Last.fm servers and then made stream-able. Essentially, a song played off a users machine doesn’t count but a song streamed from the Last.fm server does. Which makes sense. It’s radio, only online.

My view? Another source of revenue for indie artists is a good thing. Even if Last.fm sold their soul.