I've had "join in the Last.FM revolution" on my list of things to do for some time. I even think it was on my list of 2007 resolutions.

There were a couple years in the late 90s/early 00s that I was addicted to Epitonic.com and Emusic.com for recommendations and digital music discovery. But then the recommendations sent my way started to dry up and get less useful. I tried iLike a while back — for about a day. I finally deleted it from my conscious after hours of uninspired recommendations and an interface I couldn't jive with.

In the back of my mind, I think those previous experiences turned into a roadblock for me getting into another 'recommendation' vehicle. But, for a while now, I've had friends and media extol the virtues of Last.FM and I'm just about ready to make the leap.

Now I see that the folks at Waved Rumor recently reported that some of the free-wheeling Last.FM goodness have been updated. Is Last.FM still all that?:

News of the day informs us that CBS, big-pocketed owners of Last.FM, has pulled the strings to help users of Last.FM to select songs, just like a big old jukebox.

Hollywood Reporter wrote…"At a launch event here Wednesday, CBS Corp. and Last.fm executives touted this as the largest licensed music catalogue for on-demand use in the business."

According to this AFP story, "Last.fm limits to three the number of times any listener can play a particular song, referring them on the fourth try to iTunes, Amazon or another online music seller to buy the work."

More interesting to my musical sensibilities is a new 'artist royalty' deal, which will allow musicians with no record label ties to upload their songs to Last.fm, which will pay them each time someone listens to their music.

What do you think? Is this for the good or the worse (limiting song sampling)? Should I still invest the time to put together a profile?