CBS snaps up Last.fm
By Vivek | May 30th, 2007 at 05:06 am ET
CBS is supposed to be buying social music site Last.fm for $280 million. The deal might be announced sometime later today.
For fast couple of months there had been rumors that Viacom had been looking to buy Last.fm for $450 million. Apparently the deal has come for a significantly lower price and with a different company.
The London based startup claims to have 15 million monthly users, including more than 4 million in the U.S. As for CBS, this makes second acquisition in a this month for the US based broadcast TV and radio network, after it acquired WallStrip.
Personally I had expected Google to make the move since it does not have a play in music domain. But again most of the companies looking to go out for the deal must be wary of the Copyright Royalty Board, which is trying to strangle all the big music streaming sites.
Core of Last.fm’s success is the concept of recommending music to others and in turn providing links to buy songs. This simple idea has given rise to number of startups that have applied the concept across video sharing(read Divvio), p2p music(read rVibe, Grooveshark), books(read Shelfari), widgets(read iGoogle)…… Pretty much most of the newer startups try to integrate the concept that has a huge positive impact on the pageviews and content discovery.
Links:
Last.fm
on May 30th, 2007 at 7:21 am
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on May 30th, 2007 at 8:51 am
[…] Waking up this morning, I can’t help but think that the imminent acquisition of Last.fm by CBS is just the next in a series of deals that financially validate the online social recommendation concept. (StartupSquad has some of the best news coverage of the deal.) I am very excited about the rumored acquisition of StumbleUpon by eBay as well. […]
on May 30th, 2007 at 10:47 am
[…] The problem I see is one of memetic infection. Old companies with deep pockets impose old ideas and business models on new industries. Is Last.fm more likely to cave to things like the Copyright Royalty Board as a part of CBS? Yes. Does wrapping new ideas in a layer of old money ultimately stifle innovation? Yes. Sorry, Sam - even if CBS keeps their hands off, that’s not the same as being independent. […]
on May 30th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
[…] Everyone is reporting the CBS purchase of Last.fm for $280 million (which follows the recent purchase of Wallstrip for $5 million). As an aside, this could be an interesting purchase, particularly with the recent spat between Viacom (also owned by CBS parent National Amusements) and Google’s YouTube - is that a precursor to where CBS intends to leverage Last.fm? Could we soon see a property emerge that streams CBS and Viacom shows, makes recommendations based on your profile and makes the shows available for purchase? […]
on May 30th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Read Shelfari%u2014what? Put any book in and see how many members have it. They’re typically 10% of LibraryThing, if that. And they don’t illustrate the point%u2014they don’t do recommendations, probably because they have so little data. LibraryThing, meanwhile, has 14.5 million books, 18 million tags and a smorgasborg of recomendations%u2014five different types for each book, plus the “unsuggester” (the opposite of recommendations). Shelfari uses Amazon’s recs., straight off the API, and allows members to send another user a message recommending a favorite book. Hott!
on May 30th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Tim,
I was just giving pointers to startups using similar concept as Last.fm. Noway it was comprehensive list of startups operating in the space.
on July 26th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
[…] Recommendations gold diggers got a big morale booster with the buyout of music recommendation leader Last.fm by CBS couple of months back. Palo Alto, CA based startup TrustedOpinion is looking to ride high on this recommendations wave. The startup did an initial release of it’s app earlier this year that enables users to recommend movies to their friends. While the movie space might not as big as music in terms of titles and shelf life, TrustedOpinion is not planning to limit itself to it either. Since the next set of big changes have few months to showup on the site, the startup is launching a mashup with Netflix service today that removes a bit of friction from our daily life and also adds value to the platform itself. […]