Last.FM took a major step to offering completely free music on the Internet. Last.FM is an ingenious idea that let’s users share their playlists with the world and provides bios and reviews of bands and artists. It’s social music as its best.

Last.FM has now announced that it will work in partnership with the record industry to do something remarkable — offer streaming audio of tracks from all of the major record labels. This isn’t like filesharing or typical music downloads, because users will only be able to stream a track three times before they have to pay for it.

After listening to the free music, users can then buy the music downloads from places like iTunes. Users of Last.FM will have access to countless tracks that they will be able to listen to for free. This is great news for the online community and this is the most logical way of the record industry working with a service to combine streaming audio with music downloads. It’s amazing that nobody has done this before on this scale.

Artists will get paid because advertising on Last.FM will mean that each time a track is streamed, money is made. The free-music service is set to go live in US, UK and Germany.

This is the start of something new.