London — AOL has made another advance in its bid to become a portal destination, through a deal with social music site Last.fm by creating AOL Radio in Europe with a number of new features.
“Chasing on its recent pact between AOL and CBS Radio in the US, the company has now opted to target Last.fm’s 21 million global visitors.”
The Time Warner-owned website has run radio in the past, based on in-house technology, but has opted for a partnership with Last.fm to bring a youthful audience to its site.
“Nearly all of the features of Last.fm will be available to AOL Radio listeners, barring some social media tools.”
The Radio AOL online radio station, powered by Last.fm, promises to offer millions of tracks to users for streaming. Users will be able to search for and stream music from hundreds of artistes as many times as they want, create custom radio stations and listen to recommended stations without having to sign up.
“AOL is concentrating more and more on ad sales and moving away from the internet access business, following the sale of several of its ISP businesses around the world.”
Apart from the streaming music stations, AOL Radio listeners will also benefit from a range of extra content including videos, pictures and event listings, and will be able discover new music through the recommendations of other users, as well as being able to chat to their fellow listeners.
Users can also assign a genre or mood to the songs that share the same tag are subsequently arranged in groups together and offered as a mini radio station with AOL Radio on the home page.
The innovative-styled online station will also “find out” the user’s tastes based on the tracks they listen to and the ratings they give the songs then recommends other artistes and tracks, in effect creating their own personal radio station.
Last.fm has agreed to offer its collection of music tracks to the users of AOL Europe’s online radio platform in France, Germany and the UK. AOL users in the UK and Germany can repeatedly listen to the tracks available from Last.fm’s free service. The service is initially available in France, Germany and the UK with plans to roll out across Europe in the coming months.
Jonathan Lister, senior vice president of AOL European Operations, said: “I am delighted that this partnership will enable AOL’s users to discover and actively engage with new music and genres, thus creating an online community of music fans that spans the globe.”
Users can also start their own stations and connect their media player to Last.fm’s database to get alerts on the latest tracks from their favorite singers.
Offering great content is the key to AOL’s success. The rich involvement that users have with this site allows us to tap the revenue potential available, said Lister.
Martin Stiksel, co-founder of Last.fm, said: “We can offer a unique music discovery and repetitive listening service with the millions of tracks in our catalogue, allowing us to bring interactivity to online radio sites like AOL’s.”
AOL is focusing on selling ads around the service, hoping that the nature of music and social media leads to young people spending more time on its portal, thereby increasing the value of its inventory.
Last.fm, a UK site founded in 2003 to fulfill an increasing wants of online music listeners, now claims to reach 20 million users. CBS Radio, owned by Time Warner rival Viacom, paid £140m for Last.fm in May 2007 and has now embarked on a drive to generate more income from the social media site.
Last.fm also signed deals with tabloid newspaper titles Der Spiegel and Bild in Germany and supports BBC Radio’s pop music charts. The AOL Radio deal is, however, Last.fm’s largest partnership to date. The social music site may as much as double its UK reach following the deal.
AOL has recently entered into a similar deal with CBS Radio in the US. And this new deal means that AOL, Last.fm and CBS Radio will now deliver the largest online listening audience in the world.
With the ink barely dry on AOL’s purchase of Bebo for £417m — the proposed acquisition is still to officially go through — the dual developments are firm evidence that AOL is aggressively pursuing a youth audience.
“Last.fm and AOL declined to comment.”