Are you a Last.fm subscriber? I think you shouldn't have had any problems with 0.8 if you were a subscriber.

The thing goes more or less like this:

• There are two radio APIs in Last.fm: the old one (unsupported by Last.fm and subject to disappear at any time) and the new one.
• Starting from v0.8, Vagalume uses the new one. If you're not a subscriber, it won't work. However, it appears that in some countries (including the USA) the old API does work even if you don't pay a subscription.
• Vagalume 0.8.1 falls back to the old API in case the new one doesn't work, for non-subscribers in those lucky countries.

About the default radio station problem:

• In both APIs, Last.fm provides two separate methods to choose a radio station and to obtain a playlist.
• If you only press play, Vagalume will just request a new playlist. It will not choose any station for you.
• That makes Last.fm send a playlist of the last chosen station.
• The problem is that it doesn't seem to work for everyone. I don't know if it depends on the country, the API or what. But I remember having always used that feature, even with the old API.
• So the solution would be to select a default station in that case.