Microsoft says that they plan to subsidize Last.fm for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox so their users will not have to pay the subscription.

This change will go into effect on February 15.

Free Last.fm service on mobile devices turning into subscriber-only feature [Ars Technica]

At the present, you get 100% of the money from each sale. Bandcamp may take a small percentage in the future, though. You can either set your own prices, or let your fans name their own price in the style of Radiohead and 2D Boy.

I stumbled across the site a few weeks ago and thought it might be worth sharing. Their FAQ looks promising.

What’s Apple going to do with their acquisition? It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to guess that.

Imagine iTunes, but with the features of Lala built in.

Another idea is that we might be seeing a browser-based version of iTunes in the future, as part of the “merge Lala into iTunes” idea. This would make is possible to listen to, and purchase, music on a computer where you can’t install iTunes.

Apple isn’t the type of company to split themselves over more than one brand, and I can’t see them shutting down Lala, so it just seems inevitable that the two services will eventually be consolidated.

Anyway, to the design.

Simple, visually interesting, and functional. It also has one of those big, in your face search boxes that are in vogue with “Web 2.0″ sites. The front page has a Google-esque simplicity that leaves no doubt what your next step should be: to search.

When you perform a search, you are taken to the following screen, which serves as a results page and portal to play songs or perform other actions. (You can also add songs to the queue to be played, get Flash embed code to put songs on a website, share songs, etc.)

The results page is displayed as a nifty iPod-style menu, easily sortable by Songs, Artists, Albums, or Genres. You can drill down through the menus to peruse the available tracks.

The breadcrumbs and still-accessible search bar are nice touches.

The styling strikes me as slightly Mac-like, but not quite. The interface seems fairly polished, and easy enough to navigate. Pretty good overall.

If the music industry would cooperate, Last.fm (a CBS property) could take advantage of a great opportunity staring them in the face: Music sharing. Twitter and Twitter are full of people sharing links and little snippets of information. Why not make it easy for people to share music?

If you search for an individual song on Last.fm, you can often stream it right there on the spot. A growing number of tracks are like this, but most of them are still just previews. If a track comes up in Radio mode, it will always play in it’s entirety, but there are often limitations if you call up a song manually. If they could have those limitations removed, Last.fm could become a great way to refer your friends to music you like, opening the door to more music sales through the handy iTunes/Amazon affiliate links they serve up.

With that out of the way, Last.fm could focus on making it easier to share links to music streams.

• They should implement their own short URLs, in the form of last.fm/s63b1a. This would make their links more visible over all of the TinyURLs and Bit.lys all over Twitter. It would also ensure that their URLs would always work, instead of being reliant on other shorteners’ services.
• Add buttons to make it ridiculously easy to share a song or artist on Twitter and Facebook. This would help put their pages out there more, increase traffic to Last.fm, bringing them more ad revenue and sales through iTunes and Amazon.

These two simple things could potentially make a world of difference, even if it takes them awhile to free-up direct access to tracks more.