Last.fm Launches Personalized Music Videos

Written by Steve Donohue

Wednesday, May 6. 2009 at 03:15 PM EDT Post a comment

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CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS)'s Last.fm is expanding into music videos, launching a Personalized Visual Music player today that contains video advertising.

The move, which will see CBS compete in the music video space against former Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA) corporate sibling MTV Networks -- as well as AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL), MySpace , YouTube Inc. , and other sites offering ad-supported music videos -- comes just a day after CBS combined all of its music-related assets into the new CBS Interactive Music Group.

CBS is looking to differentiate Last.fm from rival music sites with a wide library of videos that include not just music videos that were recorded for TV, but also live concert video clips uploaded to YouTube and other sites containing amateur videos. MTV's video library only contains studio videos and live performances recorded at MTV events like Spring Break 2009.

Last.fm's Personalized Music Visual Music player contains prominent ads from sponsors, running adjacent to the video window. Ads running on the site Wednesday afternoon included plugs for the Budweiser summer festival series, Budget car rentals, and Mothers Day gift packages at ProFlowers.

As soon as a user types the name of a band in the search box at the top of the page, Last.fm begins playing a random song from the artist and allows you select from personalized streaming radio stations.

A search for U2 immediately returns the audio clip for its new single, "Get On Your Boots." The page contains three large windows of similar size -- one containing a photo of the band, a second window contains the audio player and the third is an ad from ProFlowers.

There are also buttons on the page that allow users to share songs and videos with friends, download ring tones, and add songs to personal libraries. Another menu tab shows every video Last.com has of the artist, which in U2's case, came to more than 150.

Users can also mix music tags such as "80s" and "soundtrack" to create multi-genre stations, and they can use a multi-artist feature to launch stations based on combinations of their favorite bands.