CBS & Last.fm - how to strangle your own acquisitions

Saturday, May 23. 2009

CBS & Last.fm - how to strangle your own acquisitions

CBS bought Last.fm in May 2007 for $280m.

In February this year, TechCrunch broke a story that Last.fm or CBS had passed on user data to the RIAA, which both parties vehemently denied. TechCrunch has now come back at them with further evidence and essentially accuses CBS of taking Last.fm data and handing it over to the RIAA:

Now we’ve located another source for the story, someone who’s very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth when they said Erick’s story wasn’t correct.

Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too.

Here’s what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for “internal use only.” It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.

The question is why?

Given that there are social music competitors out there like Pandora, Blip.fm and Spotify, and given that users by and large prefer to deal with companies that don't hand over their data, why jeopardise ones' investment so?

(Update - Ars Tech says CBS and Last.fm have denied it all....but then (and to balance my ragging of TechCrunch above), they would, wouldn't they. But it is put up or shut up time now)

Posted by Alan Patrick in Digital Media Web 2.0 at 06:18 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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last.fm co-founder Russ Garrett denied this in their forum
http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/535934/5#f9521312

"Nothing I can say will convince you that this didn't happen, because allegedly CBS did the deed and not us. I hope that CBS will issue their own denial soon, but the wheels of large companies run slowly.

This accusation was made the evening before a three-day holiday weekend in both the UK and the US. Yet again, we were not given the opportunity to respond.

The article claims that "This source’s information comes directly from Last.fm employees who he has spoken with." Nobody at Last.fm knows anything about such a leak. We didn't when they last wrote an article, and we don't now. Any suggestion that we were complicit in transferring user data to any third party is incorrect.

The exact nature of the data that was allegedly transferred is still not clear. It's implied that the data linked scrobbles to IP addresses. That particular data is controlled tightly inside Last.fm and is only stored for a short period of time. Any request for such data would have to be approved by myself first. The suggestion that CBS's ops team provided this data is just not possible - Last.fm operates as a separate entity and their operations staff do not have access to our system.

As Arrington points out, transferring personally identifiable data (i.e. IP addresses) from the UK to the US is against data protection laws. We wouldn't risk a lawsuit to pander to the RIAA's requests.

It really seems like someone is trying to slander us here."

---------

curiously, negative or even only critical enquiring comments aren't wanted in the TechCrunch article - and have been massively deleted
(as can be read in above mentioned forum thread
http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/535934/6#f9522388 )

#1 Martin on 2009-05-24 21:43 (Reply)

Martin - as I noted above, it makes no sense that CBS or Last.fm would do this, its commercial suicide.

Who would want to slander Last.fm though?

#2 alan p on 2009-05-24 22:22 (Reply)

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