It was with a smile on my face that I read last night’s announcement of the new Last.fm iPhone app.  I make no secret of the fact I love Last.fm.  Even being bought by CBS hasn’t stopped them being ’some nice people in London who do brilliant things with music and social media’.

The new iPhone app isn’t everything it could be for sure; restrictions in the iPhone OS stop it ’scrobbling’ everything you listen to, but it does allow you to listen to (and scrobble) streaming music from the site and explore other users’ tastes.  I’m sure it’ll develop over time, too.

The only major criticism of the app that I’ve seen so far is that it’s only available in a few countries at present due to music licensing issues.  The Inquisitr’s Duncan Riley sums up the feelings of Last.fm fans in countries that can’t get the app in his post ‘Last.fm iPhone App rides the georetarded fail whale‘.  While admittedly excellently titled, the post kind of misses something pretty obvious (which is odd as ex-Techcrunch writer Duncan usually comes across as highly sussed on tech business matters).

Duncan argues:

“Licensing issues? Hold on a second, don’t I have the Last.fm Mac application on my laptop and desktop, happily delivering music on demand? Exactly what difference does an iPhone application have in terms of licensing that the Last.fm website doesn’t have?”

Has Duncan read every licensing agreement that Last.fm has?  Unlikely, but to be honest, I think his post was actually born of frustration – frustration brought about by an irritating problem that really doesn’t need to exist at all.

Record labels, still desperately trying to make a buck or two in a world that no longer needs them, are fond of putting all sorts of restrictions in their business contracts.  Just ask the artists who get ‘packaging deductions’ on their royalties from digital download sales (despite the fact there’s no packaging to pay for), for example.  What’s to stop labels from having imposed restrictions on Last.fm streaming music to mobile devices in certain territories?.

In a world where intellectual copyright can be infringed and spread worldwide in seconds, record labels and every other type of media company need to ditch the idea of territories.  Sure, there are lots of complex reasons for music, TV programmes and films to be restricted to certain parts of the world.  Some of these reasons are to do with money and control and some of them more down to more practical matters (holding back on an album release in a particular country until the artist has time to tour and do a proper media blitz there, for example).  Whatever the reason for dividing the world into regions, in the end it just kicks the consumer in the face.

If I want to try out the Loopt app on the iPhone, I should be able to do so no matter where I live (it’s certainly not available in the UK at the moment).  If I’m sitting at home in Manchester and want to pay to download a new Bollywood hit film that’s just been made available in India I shouldn’t be held back by outdated restrictions.

The funny thing is, supposedly more ‘old fashioned’ businesses caught onto this long ago.  I could buy a handmade vase from South America, a new oil painting from Africa or a lump of snow from the South Pole online right now but if I want to download the latest American TV show on the day it airs, I’d have to do it illegally despite the fact it’s totally possible for the copyright owners to make it available to me if they want to.

The money that’s wasted by the music and film industries in fighting file sharing is money down the drain.  People will still download the latest Family Guy episode from a BitTorrent tracker as soon as it airs in the USA until it’s available as a download worldwide simultaneously.  Other than overly restrictive contracts and too much old-style thinking there’s nothing stopping that happening.

We live in a globally hyper-connected world.  By ignoring that global market, media and technology companies are insulting their customers for the sake of preserving an old way of doing things.  It might take some work to reorganise the way contracts are drawn up and intellectual rights are assigned, but in the end it’ll be best for the customer and, you never know, those customers might start trusting and respecting media organisations again rather than ripping them off via file sharing.