Last.fm Founders Hand Over Keys To CBS

Posted on 10. Jun, 2009 by in NEWS

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The founders of music streaming service Last.fm announced this morning that they will be leaving the company they helped create. “This is the latest stage in a long journey for us founders, which began in a living room in East London in 2002, and took us to the headquarters of one of the biggest media companies in the world.” The media company they are referring to is of course CBS, which acquired Last.fm about two years ago for $280 million. The announcement, which was posted this morning on the company’s blog, didn’t indicate why the team has chosen to leave, saying simply that, “After two years running Last.fm within CBS we feel the time is right to begin the process of handing over the reins.”

It is possible that it was CBS who informed  them it was time to leave – when a start-up is gobbled up by a larger entity, the founding cbs logo | Last.fm Founders Hand Over Keys To CBSleaders usually do not stick around for very long. Look at the recent ouster of MySpace co-creator and CEO Chris DeWolfe. The team may also have something new up their sleeve, although if they do nothing has leaked yet. Either way, they are leaving on something of a high note. According to founder Felix Miller, “Last.fm’s users have more than doubled in the last 12 months – we are now at an all-time high of 37.3M monthly unique visitors.” Yet, as Mashable notes in their coverage of the announcement, Last.fm has been under a lot of scrutiny lately related to their recent waffling over whether or not to charge international users, and accusations that they handed user data over to the RIAA.

It will be interested to see what will become of Last.fm now that CBS has full control. The presence of the original founders seemed to maintain a sense of independent thought and creativity – something that can be much more difficult for a behemoth like CBS. Yet that authenticity is valuable and a service like Last.fm wouldn’t be the same without it. That’s something CBS should definitely be thinking about right now – with the online streaming radio wars heating up recently this would not be a good time to toy with the trust of their users.

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One Response to “Last.fm Founders Hand Over Keys To CBS”

  1. Eugenia

    10. Jun, 2009

    Now that the suits have it, it won’t be the same anymore. It will obviously begin to lose its glory. Except if CBS has an epiphany and decide that they want to become the “Hulu of music”, as their competitors NBC did with Hulu. There’s hope that this kind of competition might help them do the right things rather than creating a yet another rhapsody or any of these boring services.