My daily song of the day feature is poised to switch from Yahoo Launchcast to Last.fm. I was expecting something to happen since Yahoo sold Launchcast to CBS Interactive in November. Rogers notified us that Launchcast will close by April 15. It's still working on the website by I expect it to go away at any time. I'm already using Last.fm and as soon as Launchcast closes, I'll use it exclusively. Part of the problem is that a lot of the customized internet radio services aren't available outside the US. That is true of Pandora & Spotify. Of course CBS owns Last.fm so why didn't they just rebrand Launchcast? Last.fm announced on March 24 that the as of March 30, the free customized radio service would only be available in the US, the UK & Germany. This has mostly to do with maximizing advertising rates. So the answer is the greedy little bastards bought Launchcast just to get rid of it. So I was all ready to move to another free radio site called Jango. It's not as good as Last.fm and Last.fm isn't as good as Launchcast but I can work with it. But Last.fm announced on Monday that they are "postponing" the discontinuation of free radio. Obviously they got a lot of negative feedback for this move and realized that it could affect their web traffic and ad rates. For now they're saying they're still going through with it but they're trying to come up with a solution or why postpone it. Rogers claims that they will relaunch the music page in June but I don't know if there will be a radio service. I just wanted to give a heads up before I really have to make this change.
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