Looks like LastFm, my favorite internet radio for discovering new and interesting music, is now going the same crummy path as Pandora, and limiting the number of times you can skip tracks. Blah - it never used to be like that before, and now suddenly you can apparently only skip 6 tracks and hour. I'm used to skipping FAR MORE than that in an hour...Why can’t I skip more than six times in an hour?
When you listen to Last.fm radio, there is a limit on the number of times you can skip tracks on each station. It’s a requirement of our licensing agreements that allow us to stream music legally.
If you ban a track, this also counts as a skip, because the banned track is skipped. If you ban a track when you have already reached your skip limit, the track will be banned as normal, but it will continue playing to the end.
If you find that you’re skipping a lot of tracks, you might want to try re-tuning to a different station, or try a multi artist or multi tag station.
Blah, I say. So now I have to use the Pandora method of having about 100 existing stations and when I burn out one station with 6 skips, move on to another. It works, but it's an obnoxious work-around. LastFm, believe it or not, there is actually a LOT OF BAD MUSIC out there that rightly deserves to be banned/skipped. Just listen to the 'chillwave' station for any amount of time and figure this out. Or the 'Neighborhood' option, which seems to pick the most strange and bizarre selections (for some reason the other day, LastFm fed me a death metal track called 'I'm proud of my demon'... Oh yeah, that fits with my music preferences...)
LastFm is far from perfect. The comments alone, and racy avatars, are enough to make this qualify for the K9 internet filter, plus users have no ability to block any of that. Same with radio selections: I'd be happy if there was a way to block any new music that contained the f-bomb anywhere in the title/album, but instead, if you go exploring new and different music there's no telling what you'll get.
Spotify has some potential, although the feed of new, random music isn't as good as LastFm. I like Spotify in that you can listen to the entirety of some very good albums, and just have to sit through a couple idiotic commericals. If LastFm makes more crummy changes like this, I'm going to give Spotify a lot more listening.
All you need to do is download old version of the player that doesn't have those changes. On a Mac, 1.5.4 works well, you can get it here: http://osx.iusethis.com/app/versions/lastfm
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