The massively popular music-streaming service Last.fm has just announced a major change in service, announcing today that it is aborting on-demand music streaming and instead directing listeners to new music partners MOG, Spotify, The Hype Machine, We7 and VEVO.

As of yesterday if you are a Last.fm user you would have seen the new beta track pages that offer up song previews and additional links to partner services where they can go to stream tracks in their entirety.

The new strategy means that Last.fm will primarily focus on music discovery, a strategy similar to one that Google adopted last year, though Last.fm seems particularly focused on its recommendation engine. In my opinion this is awesome, music discovery is what Last.fm does best and they should continue to push the boundaries in this field.

On that front, Last.fm writes, “Our scrobbling data shows that, for some time now, people have been using multiple music services and devices, then coming back to their Last.fm profiles to answer the question ‘what should I hear next?’ and to see / show off all their listening united in one place.”

The crux of the matter, however, is buried a bit deeper in the blog post on the reworked “beta” offering (quoted content bolded for emphasis only):

“These changes also mean that we are retiring our own on-demand track streaming, which we’ve run for the last two years in the US, UK, and Germany … We feel strongly that we can better fulfill our core mission by instead connecting our users to services in the ecosystem that, unlike us, focus primarily on a jukebox-in-the-sky streaming experience.”

While the end of on-demand streaming is a huge departure from Last.fm’s original mission, it does appear as if its partners are better equipped to stream on-demand tracks, especially given the associated legal and monetary challenges (which are immense.)

I would really like to see the further integration of music partners into Last.fm with the inclusion of a music store such as the Nokia Music Store or iTunes providing links to buy/download the track imeadiately. As cool as streaming music is we still need a selection of great quality music on CD/iPod when we are sitting in the car stuck in traffic

(Via Mashable.)