Don’t get me wrong, I love last.fm. It’s a great service. I don’t think any other product comes close to providing the same functionality of building a music profile and then matching it against other users. No, that part I have absolutely no problem with.

In fact, I think it’s absolutely amazing how last.fm built clients for the Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows platforms, and then does all the heavy lifting: cataloging song titles and artist names, playlists, and recently played tracks. Lay on top of that its ability to carefully keep track of what you are listening to (a technique they call audio scrobbling) and tie that all together on the back end with the ability to compare and listen to other people’s catalogs, and you have a killer app.

There is one thing I tripped over, though. Being the brilliant hacker that I am, though, I found a workaround. But when I pondered why the limitation was there, I could see their logic but I still believe it’s annoying and bone-headed on their part.

The fault has to do with the flash radio player widget that they offer. Here is the problem in a nutshell:

• If your web browser is logged in to the last.fm service (i.e. has a web cookie) you can create a flash-based radio station widget that you can place on a web site or blog so that other people can listen to tracks you enjoy. No problem so far.
• If you have not upgraded to their $3 a month subscription the widget creator will mysteriously fail to render your custom flash widget.
• If you dig around a bit, you will discover that you cannot, in fact, listen to your own radio station unless you subscribe.

Ok, so I can follow this reasoning, I guess.. they don’t want you listening to your entire library of scrobbled songs via the internet for free. If they allowed this, everyone would do it. Why get an iPod?

However, they leave the door open for you to create a flash widget with any other last.fm user’s radio station, including people who also do not have a current subscription.

Again, I can follow the logic, they want you to love the service so much that you will subscribe. How do you love the service? By listening to other people’s music, and finding new awesome music. Great! Love it!

Only one little catch guys: I want other people to listening to MY radio station on MY site! The way they have it set up, I can’t freaking use their own awesome widget to do that! I’d have to have some other last.fm user log in and create a widget for me. Or, I guess, get a subscription.

Baaah. I am leet.

So what I did, is I went ahead and created the widget with Steven Hodson’s radio station. Then, I took advantage of the open nature of the widget to search and replace for every instance of his name, and put my last.fm user name in. Poof! I got my widget!

You can see (and listen to) it on the scribkin contributor page.

Of course, I can’t actually listen to it myself.. unless I log out of last.fm or use a browser without a last.fm cookie. Yeah, I believe they need to re-think their artificial limitation here, but I’m not going to complain too loudly as long as I get my widget.

PS - I did want to add that I am seriously considering getting the subscription anyway, because the service is simply really great. And I don’t mind paying for great.