What I'm saying is that the expectation that you, as a user, will have to pay for the service at some point in the future, but only if you don't happen to live in their preferred countries, was not set at launch of the service. If that expectation had been set, of course it would have amounted to a less useful service.

This is tantamount to a bait-and-switch, only you as a user provided the bait. All I'm arguing here for is transparency. None of this was needed had they been transparent. It would have also helped if they asked the community for feedback.

Now, the admins basically come off as assholes who have used the community and their volunteer contributions to make a coin. Making money isn't the problem. How they've gone about doing it is.

By the way, take a look at the comments again. No one from last.fm has responded to the users in the last 5 hours and the last comment was no better than a canned reply.

It's terrible customer service. Even if I weren't affected, I'd consider removing my data and getting off the service. Who's to say they won't do it to US, UK and German users next?