The Butt Ugly Weblog

CBS snags last.fm

Last.fm, my favourite online music service, has been snatched by CBS for a nice, lump sum of $280 million USD. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Now, the question is, will CBS "get it", or will they kill Last.fm by "innovating" on new business models. Flickr has survived relatively unscathed as a part of a larger entity, but CBS is old money, and they've got lots of old farts making decisions. It remains to be seen whether the DNAs of these two companies are compatible.

My guess is that they aren't, and we'll see a slow decline of Last.fm from a hassle-free, personal radio station into a product-placement and advertisement -ridden, badly encoded stream that chooses songs based on who pays the most money instead of what the user actually might prefer.

For some reason, I am feeling fairly cynical this week. Nothing ever works quite the way you would hope it to, and at some point it just gets to you, you know?