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No middleman. Claims of paying their artists more than twice the royalty rate offered on commercial radio. Sounds pretty darn good for independent artists, doesn’t it? Last.FM is a music-streaming service that says they offer all of that and more.  The company actually launched in January of 2007, and has since been bought by CBS, so, they have some pretty strong backing holding them up. And they are starting to pass the longer running Sound Exchange even with the fact that royalty rates for music being streamed over the Internet has been raised; making it somewhat difficult for ad-supported start-ups to stay afloat. Some people though, say this is not wholly due to their really being all for the artist, but instead because they pay rock bottom royalty rates. From a commenter at DashGo regarding Last.Fm’s royalty tier - “Even bands that write just one great song deserve compensation for their copyright. Maybe not by a major label force bundling it into an album, but certainly at more than 30% of whatever pitifully low CPM Last.fm and CBS can dredge up - something they won’t even guarantee a floor on.”

However, Last.FM maintains they support smaller labels that possibly couldn’t exist on a site like SoundExchange due to their size, or for some other reason. They say that their account creation is up 60% since January and users have uploaded over 450,000 tracks. So, looks like somebody is listening at least.

I don’t know. A way to shake down the poor indie guys who can’t afford a label, or a site that seriously wants to support the local music scene? Music for the masses to offer it up in a cool new way, or a yet another dot.com simply out to roll in bucku-bucks at the expense of the little dude?  I think this one just may play out to be the former.

Via [TechCrunch]