Free on demand music is officially a hit.
CBS owned Last.fm says it has had a unique listener bump of 92% in the four weeks since the launch of their free on-demand music service. In addition, unique visitors continued to show sustained growth, up 59%, and page views increased 58%. Last.fm says it has 21 million active users worldwide monthly.
Currently the free-on-demand service is available in the U.S., U.K. and Germany without registration or the download of any software and is scheduled to roll out globally in the coming months.
Martin Stiksel, Last.fm co-founder, said: "We've created a new model that works for everyone -- listeners, artists and copyright holders -- and the user response proves that it is working. Free is the future, and this is signaled not only by the industry's growing acceptance of what we're doing, but more importantly, by the incredibly fast increase of users accessing music on Last.fm since we launched free-on-demand."
