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30 May 2007
So, CBS bought Last.fm. How do we feel about that? →[More:]It makes me feel dirty, and I'm considering trashing my account.
Well, having never heard of Last.fm, it means nothing to me. However, $280 million for a site like that seems high, something you might have seen in '99 rather than '07
I kinda figure if they do start fucking it up, someone will come along to make something better. And yeah, this does feel like the internet bubble all over again. oh god I can't wait for those awesome tech IPO parties to come back,
We - and I'm using the royal we, here, to represent my small kingdom consisting of my dogs and myself - don't care. OTOH, we're all still frothing at the mouth about the Yahoo takeover of Flickr.
I'm also not particularly happy and not completely sure why. But I never use the radio features, and I think that my life will go on even without a webpage that tracks a particular subset of my recent music listening. We'll see.
Eh, when I rebuilt my computer, I couldn't figure out how to reinstall the audioscrobbler with my old version of Winamp. Do they want me to use their media player now? No thanks. In other words, I haven't used it since last year. So basically, I don't care.
Better than Disney or Fox buying it; among the 'old media' names, CBS tends to "get it" better than most (oddly, since the 'un-merger' of Viacom and CBS, the part with the older name has been much more new-media-smart). And be extra glad it's not a media company with RIAA record labels. Still, I've never used last.fm myself; I keep all my audio files to myself, so it doesn't matter. But all the good website ideas (and most of the bad ones) are going to be bought up by one of 10-12 megacorps in the next year or so... all except MetaFilter. Not that Matt wouldn't be deeply tempted, but it doesn't have the geometric growth potential they're looking for, and that's good.
muddgirl: Instead of a plug-in they have a standalone app you have to install. It's fine though, it's not a pain in the ass or anything. I still use it with winamp.
And I'm not terribly pleased with this because I know even if they say everything is ok and nothing is going to change, that really doesn't mean anything. It'll change if CBS wants it to.