Last.fm’s decision to start charging for web streaming of their radio service outside the US, UK and Germany made reasonable financial sense for them didn’t make me too happy.
As a consequence of the news (it seems), a new open source project was started called libre.fm. Right now the project is in closed alpha and will allow you to collect the information of songs you’re listening to, similar to audioscrobbler.
If you get an invite, all you have to do is install turtle to start sending the information of your listening habits. Libre.fm will have all of the code released under GNU AGPL and much like laconi.ca, you will be able to launch your own instance or use their own hosting to store your data.
Right now it is an early stage project, but since it is open source who knows what will appear in the future?
Now if only I could get an invite…