Image via CrunchBase

I was recently introduced to Blip.fm, a service TechCrunch proclaimed a "Twitter for music" – find songs you want to hear, and play them with a short message. After Last.fm decided to hate on anyone not in the US, UK, or Germany, I thought that Blip.fm would be a better way to find new music to enjoy. But nope!

Blip.fm just recently announced that they're going to be changing some things due to the "perfect storm" through which the company is navigating. And these changes aren't very good at all for anyone who doesn't live in the USA. To begin, they're going to be cutting back on providing URLs to music they themselves are getting from all over the internet, and will be using imeem to provide a lot of the music now.

Of course, the imeem decision means that most international users will only get 30 seconds of a song, not the entire song. So, if you're not in the USA, expect Blip.fm to become practically useless for you. They state that they'll add an option to skip the 30 second clips, but that won't leave international users with much music at all.

While the guys behind Blip.fm won't say it, it's pretty clear where the real blame for all this trouble lies: With the music industry. It's like those idiots at the RIAA and their international counterparts want people to download music instead. These fools and their spiteful behaviour are screwing over decent online services and making it impossible for people to legally and easily access music they can get easily enough with a stereo and a tape deck.

Unfortunately, though, the net result is that those good online services have to start hating on anyone who doesn't live in the USA. And that totally sucks.