I love last.fm, yes I do.

It was always a cool service, with a great community and intuitive design. Sure, you could listen only 30secs of commercial tracks, but nonetheless, last.fm was great.

Now it is even greater. Why?

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Read the full announcement.

EMI, Sony BMG, Warner and Universal are all on board. The concept is, that users are allowed to listen to full length tracks up to 3 times and then are asked to sign up for a new subscribition service.

Although I personally find it sad, that last.fm isn’t printing any money to pay the artists and the labels, I find their approach also really good:

We already have licenses with the various royalty collection societies, but now unsigned artists can put their music on Last.fm and be paid directly for every song played. This helps to level the playing-field—now you can make music, upload it to Last.fm and earn money for each play. If you make music, you can sign up to participate for free. [...] we are paying artists and labels a share of advertising revenue from the website.

Additional information on the subject can also be found in Mashable.