[storm]

My understanding is that anything that allows the user to choose what specific tracks they want to hear is deemed "interactive" by the industry, and costs an awful lot more than "non-interactive". "Non-interactive" appears to mean streams which the user can only broadly determine the content of (i.e. genre or like-artist 'stations'), can't allow skipping over tracks too aggressively, and who knows what other restrictions.

I don't have any idea as to how big of a difference in licensing fees we're talking about here, and I know it's very hard to make a buck in this sphere with so many vampires in the picture. But not paying up for interactive seems like a really bad call on last.fm's part (and/or suggests that they are in pretty rough shape as profits go). The list of things they're removing is essentially a list of "all the reasons why I might be interested in using last.fm".