London - CBS-owned (NYSE: CBS) social music discovery service Last.fm announced on Wednesday that it has partnered with Radiohead to offer the band's "In Rainbows" album for free streaming from its site, supported by advertising. The rights were licensed through the "one stop" digital licensing platform that Radiohead and publisher Warner/Chappell Music created at the end of last year. The band previously made "In Rainbows" available as a pay-what-you-want download; Last.fm said it has already been streamed 22,000 times in its first 12 hours of availability.

New York - Major record label Universal Music Group on Tuesday announced a deal with CBS-owned (NYSE: CBS) Last.fm that will make UMG's music video catalog available for free, on-demand streaming on the social music discovery service. Under the deal, Universal and its artists will receive revenue for every video streamed; more specific details were not disclosed. "We want to offer a video library that rivals our unparalleled music catalogue, as we work towards Last.fm becoming the only place you need to go to for all music-related content, and this deal marks the first step towards that goal," said Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel.

New York - Merlin, a new trade body founded a year ago with the aim of representing the rights of independent labels worldwide, announced on Wednesday that its membership has grown to over 12,000 labels, representing over 8% of the U.S. market -- equal to that of major label EMI Music. The group claims to now be in essence a "fifth major label," and said it is currently in discussions with Last.fm (NYSE: CBS) and MySpace (NYSE: NWS), as well as other major digital companies, to ensure competitive remuneration for independents worldwide.

New York - Major record label Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) has pulled its catalog from free on-demand music streaming service Last.fm, according to reports. The label was the first of the majors to sign a deal to stream its songs for free on Last.fm -- which was acquired by CBS (NYSE: CBS) for $280 million -- and it may be seeking to improve the terms of its deal with the move.

New York - CBS-owned (NYSE: CBS) social music discovery service Last.fm on Thursday announced a partnership with New York City concert promoter Bowery Presents, to hatch a new Last.fm-sponsored concert series that will feature emerging artists. London-based Last.fm has held similar events in the U.K. since late last year. The first New York shows, which will be filmed by Bowery Presents for screening on Last.fm, will feature bands including Lightspeed Champion, Flowers Forever and Fleet Foxes.

New York - CBS's (NYSE: CBS) Last.fm social music discovery service on Wednesday introduced "Last.fm in a Box," a service that lets partners access its ad-supported personalized streaming radio services directly from their own websites. Initial partners include Bebo, eMusic, iGoogle, Meebo, Billboard.com, LiveNation, Ning, Six Apart and WordPress.com.

New York - CBS's (NYSE: CBS) Last.fm social music discovery service announced on Monday an official media partnership with the Lollapalooza music festival, and will power Lolla Radio, the festival's official Web radio service that lets users listen to songs from artists performing at the festival.

New York - Last.fm, the social music discovery service owned by CBS, has signed a deal to power AOL Europe's online radio service, beginning in the U.K., France and Germany. The company signed a similar deal earlier this year to power AOL Radio in the U.S.

New York - CBS's (NYSE: CBS) social music discovery service Last.fm said on Monday that it will offer an exclusive preview of Portishead's new album, "Third," in its entirety for free on its site for a week before its official release on April 21.

New York - CBS-owned (NYSE: CBS) music discovery service Last.fm said on Wednesday that, since it launched free full-song streaming on its site in January, overall CD and download sales through its partnership with Amazon.com (NASD: AMZN) are up 119%. The free streaming feature has also fueled a 66% increase in album and tracks purchased at Amazon from existing Last.fm users. "In just over two months it's become clear that people will buy CDs and downloads if they get access to the kind of service we offer," said Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel, who added that minutes spent on site are also up 118% month-on-month.

New York - CBS Radio (NYSE: CBS) announced on Tuesday that it will provide streaming of all of its 140 radio stations on Last.fm, the social music service it purchased for $280 million last May.

Under the compulsory license for the use of sound recordings - the license which allows Internet radio services to use all legally recorded sound recordings by paying a royalty set by the Copyright Royalty Board - the designated collection agency can, once each year, audit a licensee to assess its compliance with the royalty requirements. Under the law, when the collective decides to audit a company, it must notify the Copyright Royalty Board, who then gives public notice of the fact that an audit is to take place. The Copyright Royalty Board has just announced that SoundExchange has decided to audit Last.FM.

New York - CBS's (NYSE: CBS) music discovery service Last.fm on Thursday announced the launch of a new section that showcases third-party applications designed to work with the service. The company estimated that activity around third-party applications on other websites added 19 million users to its service in January, in addition to the 21 million active users engaging with the Last.fm site itself. "We'll be moving into mobile, games consoles and partnering with other great media platforms to guarantee that Last.fm continues to drive the best music discovery and listening on the Web," said co-founder Richard Jones.

New York - Last.fm, the social music discovery service acquired by CBS (NYSE: CBS) last year for $280 million, announced on Friday that, since introducing free on-demand music streaming to its service last month, it has seen unique visitors grow 59% and page views jump 58%. The company's deal allows free streaming of songs from all four major labels and a number of independents. It now counts 21 million unique users each month, based on internal data. "We've created a new model that works for everyone -- listeners, artists and copyright holders -- and the user response proves that it is working," said Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel. "Free is the future, and this is signaled not only by the industry's growing acceptance of what we're doing, but more importantly, by the incredibly fast increase of users accessing music on Last.fm since we launched free-on-demand."

New York - Last.fm, the social music discovery service acquired last May by CBS (NYSE: CBS), announced on Wednesday that it has launched a new free service that allows anyone to listen to songs on-demand -- from all four major labels and more than 150,000 independents. The company claims 20 million unique monthly users in 240 countries, and said the new service will be available worldwide in the coming months, after a limited launch in the U.S., U.K. and Germany today.

London - CBS (NYSE: CBS) has given notorious Sweden-based file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay authorization to use the Last.fm API on its site, which will provide information on artists and songs to users searching the site for free downloads, The Register reports. A Last.fm spokesman told The Register that it will not seek to endorse The Pirate Bay, but has no control over who uses the API, and that to block The Pirate Bay wouldn't be "in the spirit" of the API.

London - Social music discovery service Last.fm, a unit of CBS (NYSE: CBS), on Thursday released a music application for the 122,000 communities on Ning, a collection of niche social networks. Users of the Ning platform will be able to add Last.fm's application, which displays favorite artists and allows site visitors to launch a radio station based on any of the user's chosen artists. The application was designed to take advantage of Google's (NASD: GOOG) new OpenSocial standard, which will allow such applications to run across a variety of social networks, blogs and websites.

It’s been a good year for Last.fm, the social network / Internet radio station. It’s grown its market share amongst music websites by 22%, sold itself to CBS in May for $280m, and has now struck a deal with music industry bible Music Week to provide weekly charts based on its listening data. The idea behind the charts is track listening habits, rather than music sales, in order to identify up and coming new artists and songs. The chart below illustrates the growth in UK Internet traffic to last.fm, but excludes traffic generated by its downloadable app.

New York - Last.fm, the online social music network recently acquired by CBS for $280 million, announced on Monday that it has signed a new global licensing agreement with major label Sony BMG.

New York - CBS Corporation announced on Wednesday that it has acquired U.K.-based social music network Last.fm, for $280 million in cash.