In late May 2009, until-then free, online music-streaming service Last.fm (http://last.fm) announced it would start charging for its service.

Not that the charge itself was an unreasonable amount, three euro a month for an unlimited amount of streaming music is not a bad deal. It was also not the business logic behind the decision that made it seem unfair. Last.fm reportedly had to switch business models when advertising simply no longer covered fees they had to pay to royalty-collectors.

What gave Last.fm’s decision a nasty after-taste was the fact that if you lived in the US, Canada, the UK or Germany, you would not have to pay and could continue to use the service for free. Why? Because Last.fm’s sales department was unable to sell enough advertising outside these countries. As international as the internet is, advertisers and sales are still a very local business.

Now it is trivial enough to install Tor (http://www.torproject.org) and configure it so that, to the last.fm server, you appear to be in any of these countries, but that is not the point. Last.fm got quite a bit of flak on blogs and in forums about the decision and many of its users started looking for alternatives. But besides P2P downloads, what is available?

Cherrypeel (http://www.cherrypeel.com), founded out of frustration over the difficulty of finding new music, offers artists a place to upload their music and for listeners to discover new music. It is full of artists you will probably never have heard of, but that is part of its appeal.

TheSixtyOne (http://www.thesixtyone.com) works on a similar principle; artists upload their music and users select, filter and vote for songs. The best way to describe Blip.fm (http://blip.fm) is probably as mp3 player meets Twitter. Blip.fm has a song archive users can search, and then blip a tweet-like message of 150 characters with the song to other users, who can award "props" for the quality of the selection.

Grooveshark (http://listen.grooveshark.com) allows users to upload music, create and share playlists. The user interface of Grooveshark with its moving panel-lists, should be immediately familiar to iPhone users, thought at least at first it seems a bit odd online.

We Are Hunted (http://wearehunted.com) gets its playlists from blogs, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, forums, and P2P to create a "most popular songs online" playlist. Maybe not a tool you would want to use for streaming, but certainly a great way to be introduced to new music. We Are Hunted offers links to buy the songs you are listing to online, though none of these are available in Bulgaria.