And now Last.fm is cutting back even further on playing tunes, as it struggles to turn a profit for owner CBS.

The service, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary currently, will in 2013 require subscription for the “radio” features of its desktop client in the US, UK and Germany, and will stop offering the service elsewhere in the world except Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Brazil (announcement). Curiously, web radio will remain free.

A CBS VP with Last.fm oversight told me in 2010 it hoped to turn a profit that year, but we have since received no confirmation, when asked, that has yet happened.

Last.fm introduced the £3-a-month subscriptions belatedly in March 2009 as it dawned on the industry that ad-supported music streaming could not support online businesses in the same way it does traditional radio. A year later, it abandoned on-demand music streaming — the most costly of all to license.

Instead, Last.fm is happy to advise users to listen instead through services like Spotify, which have overtaken it in the sexy stakes and inside which Last.fm now even has an app of its own. At the end of the day, why shouldn’t Last.fm charge for the same kind of service Pandora does?

With less and less music — at least, free music — Last.fm is reverting to its original core concept of tracking listening habits (or, “scrobbling”) and making connections through the data. The site is celebrating its tenth birthday by outputting historic artist and track popularity data as charts in press releases. Like a 90s boy band reforming for one last tour, if there were a more potent illustration that much of the value of Last.fm  – which CBS acquired for $280 million in 2007 — is in the past, I don’t know what it would be.

But this diminished focus is, at the same time, joyous — for, connecting data about songs and their listeners has always been Last.fm’s strong suit…

• Any lapsed Last.fm users like me who revisit the site today will find the recommendations and gig listings based on their listening habits are excellent.
• When experienced inside Spotify, Last.fm’s recommendations are one of the best things about the Swedish music player, which has lacked meaningful discovery features until last week’s upgrade announcement.
• Meanwhile, the Xbox Last.fm app, free for those who subscribe to a Gold Xbox Live membership, is an excellent way to program eclectic music during parties.

Last.fm’s radio subscriptions may keep ticking over with perhaps a couple of hundred thousand subscribers. But now it’s probably time to mine the music data, not the music itself, to find Last.fm’s real value.

• launching on iOS, Android and Windows 8.
• upping its catalogue from 10 million to 18 million tracks with new indie signings from Merlin, The Orchard, VidZone, INgrooves Fontana and Believe Digital.
• gaining bundled carriage on Lenovo Windows PCs, tablets and Android devices.
• upping its availability from 20 to 27 countries.

To anyone who has watched Rara’s activity – or, rather, lack of – since it was spun out in December 2011 so Omnifone could concentrate on being a B2B vendor, knowledge that Rara already operates in 20 countries is surprising. The company has few subscribers so far, if its reluctance to disclose user count is anything to go by.

“We came out of the gate very quickly,” CEO and Coca-Cola veteran Nick Massey tells paidContent.

“The priority over the last 10 months has been to complete the technical work. We’re now ready to start leaning in to the product.”

That will major on actually marketing the service in six countries – the US, UK, Sweden, Germany, Spain and Australia. But the campaign will be online-only, comprising networked display ads, Facebook ads, search engine marketing and affiliate partners.

As MP3 downloads slow down, music subscription is a segment ripe for business by several players. But it is also one increasingly dominated by its darling Spotify. Rara, launching substantially later, will have its work cut out making any headway.

Massey suggests Rara’s differentiation lays in Omnifone’s office location, the HQ of a record label.

“We’re competing for hearts and minds,” Massey says. “We want Rara to mean something in an authentic manner in the music space.

“We were born in Island Records, where Bob Marley recorded his music – we think we have compelling story to tell.

“We’re not like others who want to sell devices or software serves, we’re just about the music.”

But Rara faces big challenges, and some of the differentiators Massey spotlights are also professed by Spotify’s many other challenges.

“Hand-curated playlists are highly relevant to a mass-market consumer who is not necessarily a hardcore music fan,” he says.

“Rather than go home and go straight to the search box, maybe a better way is to go to the chillout playlist we have hand-curated for you.”

What is different is that, unlike Spotify and some rivals, Rara will not use the freemium model to pick up users for conversion to its premium service (£4.99 on desktop, £9.99 for mobile).

Instead, all users must pay from the outset – £0.99 or $0.99 for a three-month opening period before the full-price requirement kicks in. In this model, Massey claims to avoid some of the business model questions that have fallen on its more popular rivals.

“Eighty percent of all the people who use freemium never pay you,” he says.

“They have to bring in outside investment to prop up the usage. That’s not our model.

“Every user pays from day one, albeit something, so our requirements from capital are a lot less than the freemium guys.

“That leap (from £0.99$0.99 to £4.99/$4.99 and £9.99/$9.99) is less risky than the leap of taking someone who can’t or won’t pay and trying to convert them.”

That approach may make Rara more sustainable than Spotify, and requiring payment from everyone may give it better conversion rates. But it may also discourage younger listeners and other refuseniks who simply won’t ever discover the service.

We have already reported strong mobile figures from the BBC (a third of web visits, a tenth of video streams) and NBC (16 percent of web users, 45 percent of video requests).

But Balfour’s stats show even higher mobile engagement - 60 percent of visits to the official London2012.com site and apps came from mobile devices.

That ratio is so high partly because the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) had several apps in circulation! As well as the London2012.com websites. But mobile web in isolation took over half of weekend web traffic.

In all, the London2012.com site clocked about three times more users than the BBC Sport effort.

Read on for more official end-of-games data on how London 2012 fared with social media, location-based engagement, email marketing and more…

On the busiest individual days of London 2012, BBC.co.uk served even more traffic than during the whole of the 2012 soccer World Cup, BBC Olympics product head Cait O’Riordan writes (release). That number is 2.8 percent petabytes.

We previewed the BBC’s Olympics online strategy here, here and here. Beside near-day-long coverage across five of its nine linear TV channels, the corporation had cast up to 2,500 hours of live action (every minute of every event) on its website for desktop, smartphone and tablet and through up to 24 simultaneous live streams available online, through internet TVs and via satellite and cable TV.

• An average 9.5 million global daily uniques to the BBC Sport website is almost a quarter higher than the previous record level.
• Video requests were doubled from those seen during any previous event (106 million) – higher than the 2008 games (32 milion) and 2010 World Cup (38 million).
• A third of web visits came from mobile. But only a tenth of video requests were mobile.
• Most interestingly, the majority of video requests (62 million) were for live streams. Only eight million were for on-demand live streams, 35 million were for short-form clips.
• The BBC, which adapts streaming quality to viewers’ bandwidth, says the average bitrate was “the highest the BBC has ever delivered online” at 1Mbps.

O’Riordan:

“Offering everything isn’t enough in the age of multiple devices: our further ambition was to ensure audiences could access our coverage wherever they were, and whenever they wanted it.

“This has really been the multi-platform Games, where audiences have consumed our content across PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV at different times of the day.”

Hourly viewership by platform shows how most usage came from office computers at lunchtime. The newest phenomenon, albeit in line with previously-issued BBC data, is that, despite being a relatively new form factor, tablets accounted for more viewing than any other online medium late at night, as people swiped their iPads whilst watching TV from their sofas and whilst heading to bed.

Mobile and tablet traffic also peaked at weekends. (40 percent of browsers compared with 30 percent on weekdays).

The BBC recently introduced a new web video player for Wimbledon, F1 2012 and the Olympic Games, melding live with catch-up sports. New stats show in-stream chapter markers, allowing live viewers to rewind to key events, were clicked 1.5 million times each day.

Google on Tuesday published data showing the largest share of searches for “Paul McCartney”, as his performance closed out London 2012′s opening ceremony, came from smartphones…

Strung out over the games’ first two whole days, Google’s data shows desktop regaining the majority of search share for Olympics-related queries; only Japan saw the majority of searches from handsets…

Evidently, mobiles and tablets pull the strongest audiences at night and around large events. Dai Pham and Adam Grunewald of Google’s mobile ads marketing team write:

“We see these trends in many multi-screen events (such as the Super Bowl, Oscars, and Eurovision). But the Olympics represents an even more pronounced trend and one we can see happening at a global level.”

Ahead of the games, three quarters of IAB and Mojiva survey respondents (U.S. and UK) said they would follow their country’s Olympic team via mobile in some way. Half said they would do so whilst watching TV.

Although both NBC and the BBC are broadcasting multiple simultaneous live events on the web, the BBC is also pushing those streams out through up to 24 new channels to living-room TVs.

Seventeen million people have used this BBC “Red Button” to watch those streams for at least 15 minutes over the last week, the corporation says.

That means around a quarter of the UK population has delved beyond primary linear TV, toward narrowcast live sport.

What does this tell us about the nature of live, prime-time, linear broadcasting versus narrowcasted alternatives… ?

1. Super-serving slices thick

Firstly, whether they are carrying high-profile or esoteric, little-supported events, all 24 of those channels are being used…

Every one of the 24 channels has seen 100,000 users at some point, according to BBC Sport and London 2012 product head Cait O’Riordan. Although the sheer breadth of simultaneous options might have diluted the audience for each, it appears to have held steady – 100,000 is a considerable audience for narrowcast events.

2. Even bigger than the web

In the same period, the BBC Sport Olympics website has clocked up 18 million unique browsers, peaking at eight million from the UK. That means more UK viewers are engaging with their living-room Red Button than with the website.

The web has become acknowledged as the uber catch-up, choice and depth platform. Audiences just hadn’t yet appeared conditioned to expect, on their TV, the same number of choices presented online…

But the BBC is blurring the platforms. Although all 24 BBC Olympics live streams are being streamed on the BBC’s website, the same IP streams also arrive on the BBC’s Virgin Media and connected TV Red Button platforms.

3. Narrowcast is surviving broadcast onslaught

The BBC has devoted excellent blanket coverage to the Olympics. Three of the UK’s primary linear channels – BBC One, Two and Three – have all but shelved their daytime and evening schedules in place of live events, analysis, interviews, highlights and magazine features. There may be enough material being pumped out of these core channels to satisfy anyone – even those who have missed an event are likely to find highlights looping around any minute now.

But that makes the 24 streams’ performance even more impressive, proving that there is always a passionate audience wanting to go deep, no matter how niche the interest.

4. UK mobile viewing matching U.S.

Last week, an under-pressure NBC said 45 percent of its Olympics IP video streams were to mobile and tablet devices. BBC figures show a similar ratio, with a combined 41 percent. It is fascinating to see mobile viewing consistently high in two entirely different timezones…

Even the one supposed bright spot — the long-awaited expansion of Netflix services into Europe — has failed to offset the gloom: gaining a million new subscribers but costing $89 million in Q2 alone.

Things could have been very different, however.

Back in 2004, the company was on the verge of launching in the U.K. when it suddenly decided to pull out. The reason? A complicated competitive situation — primarily a local service called Lovefilm — and a huge spoiler from Amazon which announced a British-focused video service. The combination sent it scarpering to prepare for an all-out war with Jeff Bezos: but had Hastings stuck the course, Netflix would probably be far and away the leader in this market today.

And that comes from somebody who should know: Lovefilm’s founding CEO, Adam Valkin.

Now a venture partner at Accel’s London office, Valkin hasn’t been involved directly with Lovefilm — which was bought by Amazon in 2011 — for five years. But he is certain that Netflix would have got the jump on the local market if it’d had the guts to launch back in the day.

“Netflix decided to come to the UK in 2004 — and honestly, if they came, I think it would have been a completely different story,” he told me.

“They decided the day before they launched to pull out, because Amazon had announced they were going to launch in the UK. So Netflix said ‘well, if Amazon are going to launch in the UK, they’re going to launch in the US, which means we’ve got to go back to the US and worry about the US and let them have the UK.’”

“We had to contend with Amazon, which was a tough company,” he said. “But it was one of 1,000 things they were doing — so we competed with Amazon really well, to the point when they actually sold us their competitor and they ultimately bought back the whole thing. But if Netflix had launched it would have been a different story.”

In the end it was another eight years before the company ventured across the Atlantic again, by which time the situation was very different. In fact, Lovefilm has proven so successful for Amazon that its London HQ is now going to be at the center of the Seattle-based company’s global media plans.

That announcement, one of a sequence of good news stories for startups in the British capital, shows how far the company has come in the intervening period.

“To me it is unbelievable,” he said. “I haggled to buy the domain name Lovefilm for $25,000 from a film production company that used it for surveys. When you deal with all of that stuff, when you have nothing, just an idea and a business plan… I’ve got to say, it does feel like quite a long time ago now.”

Defending itself against this week’s “#NBCFail” criticism, NBC on Thursday revealed stats from its first five days online video streaming. NBC research president Alan Wurtzel told journalists:

• “Nearly 28 million people have visited NBCOlympics.com – eight percent higher compared to Beijing.”
• 64 million total video streams served across all platforms – 182 percent increase over Beijing
• Served 5.3m hours of live video – already “surpassed the total of all the games we streamed in Beijing”.

That website traffic growth is minimal for a four-year time advance. The biggest revelation is in mobile and video specifically…

• 60 percent of video streams are happening “online” (ie. desktop web), “another 45 percent is (from) a combination of tablet and phones“, Wurtzel said.
• “Nearly 4.6m people have gone to the mobile site – double the number from Beijing.
• “Apps for mobile have consistently been among the top five apps in the app store since the games began, and have been downloaded more than six million times.”

Of course, not much of this is necessarily a surprise in growth terms. Some of these devices (ie. tablets) didn’t even exist four years ago; smartphones were around but are now commonplace, pushed in to many more owner’s hands by the Android boom and general adoption growth.

But the ratio of mobile viewing amongst the total is interesting.

“Sixty percent of Americans don’t even work in an office,” Wurtzel said. “A lot of those folks are going to be watching on mobile for the first time”.

That so many of the streams are viewed whilst portable - most likely during day time – may be a happy fact for NBC. A natural consequence of this may be to gather the largest audience on users’ best screen – their TV – during the evening.

There is one looming challenge. Right now, most internet streams are to dedicated mobile devices and to the web. In another four years, internet video to living room TVs will be commonplace. Internet-connected TVs present an opportunity to super-serve audiences with copious live coverage – but broadcasters may be disallowed from streaming to “TV” in this way by their cable partners.

“We’ve had some challenges,” NBC Sport chair Mark Lazarus conceded. “They’ve been documented by some of you and some of our critics in social media. Some of it is, in fact, fair and we are listening. We knew it wouldn’t be perfect and we said that before the games – we are trying new things.”

Prime-time loves spoilers:

NBC, whose merger partner Comcast ranks #26 in this year’s paidContent 50 list, has been ridiculed online for holding back live events for U.S. prime time whilst online chatter and news reports give away results to online users. But NBC research president Alan Wurtzel said results of a 1,000-viewer survey conducted on Sunday showed:

“Forty-three percent said they’d heard about results of Olympic events … but they said they were more likely to watch the prime time coverage that night than those who hadn’t.”

Wurtzel said a second survey showed:

“Viewers who streamed live events on Saturday were nearly twice as likely to watch the prime-time broadcast, and spent 50 percent more time watching that those who didn’t stream.”

Still, NBC aims to try harder not to spoil its own coverage, after some company tweets gave away event results. ”We’re learning as we go here,” Lazarus said. “We meet every morning to go over what we’ve learned. We’re talking about tweaking the timings and how we push out.”

NBC digital stats:

Wurtzel presented stats showing 64 million total video streams served across all platforms, while regular TV viewing has outperformed NBC’s Beijing games for six consecutive nights, Wurtzel said, suggesting it is benefitting from a halo effect from other platforms. See the full online viewing breakdown.

‘Minority’ see ‘fail’:

NBC is streaming all of the games at NBCOlympics.com.

But has variously been mocked for tape delays, replacing sensitive opening-ceremony scenes with commercials, poor commentary, for the website requiring cable authentication and for Twitter temporarily suspending a user for tweeting an NBC executive’s email address.

Lazarus defended:

“Everyone has got the right to have their point of view. The overwhelming majority of the people are voting with their clickers, fingertips and mousclicks and saying ‘we enjoy what you do’.

“We listen to (the criticism of a) very loud minority. But the silent majority has been with us for the last six days.”

The defense, of course, exposes the overarching importance of television’s old prime time advertising slot in an emerging IP world that, at least to fans who care enough, has so much more potential for real-time immediacy.

Old and new

Lazarus drew attention to NBC’s online Olympics commitment, enhanced from Beijing:

“No one’s ever done this much simultaneous live streaming before.  We are doing a lot of experimentation, we will continue to do that. We are mixing tradition and innovation.

“There are so many events going on, you physically cannot do everything live. All the events are available through the streaming to cable customers – that’s 90 percent of the consumer base.

“We’re archiving the best of these live events for our prime time show – that’s traditional – (pulling out the) story arcs. The Olympics is so much more than a sporting event.

“Not everyone is going to be happy – but it’s clear (viewers) are coming in droves and staying night after night. We believe we’re doing everything we can to satisfy the majority of our viewers – the results bear out.”

He made non-specific reference to how things might change in future: “By 2020, the one thing we know for sure is that the media’s going to change.” But the bigger change, fortunately for NBC, is that the next games, in Rio, will be on a more accommodating time zone.

“Rio will be live,” Lazarus said. “Sochi (2014 Winter Olympics), we’ll have to wait and see where they schedule the events and what time that translates to here. Our preference is live in prime time where we can.”

In a 24-hour world, it seems 8pm-to-11pm is still where the money is. Lazarus said NBC, which had initially forecast to lose $200 million on the Olympics, will do far better:  ”We’ve made significant incremental money and will now be around breakeven. There’s a small chance we could make a little bit of money – we’ll know over the next few weeks.”

From autumn, the magazine will be given away at London Underground stations in zones one and two. The publisher plans to distribute over 300,000 copies.

The magazine has lost 40 percent of its average weekly circulation in the last decade, to just 55,032, our chart shows…

The publisher promises “closer integration across all of Time Out’s print and digital products”, but did not clarify what that means.

Going free is repeating a trick performed successfully by London paper the Evening Standard. Abandoning cover price requires beefing up ad sales efforts, but the Standard has has managed to make more money by reaching more readers.

Freesheet newspaper circulation is in decline in Europe since the late noughties, when publishers rushed to launch rival titles and later closed some of them amid the ad sales downturn, according to researcher Piet Bakker.

The Evening Standard has filled the void left by The London Paper and London Lite’s exit, while a number of lifestyle magazines – Shortlist and Stylist – have followed suit.

With Time Out’s decision, the free magazine market may now be set for the same kind of shake-out newspapers had endured.