Last.fm, last legs?

Sunday, February 22. 2009

Neilsen Blogpulse - Last.fm vs Spotify

The news cycle spins fast and flimsy these days. Late Friday night, TechCrunch posted an unsourced rumour that CBS-owned Last.fm handed a “giant dump” of user data to the RIAA. The music org was said to have requested the data, which could be used to find users who are listening to as-yet-unreleased tracks, after U2’s upcoming album was leaked two weeks before release.

But Last.fm came out fighting. After its New York-based CBS (NYSE: CBS) spokesperson told TechCrunch “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA”, Richard Jones (pictured), one of the remaining three co-founders in London, wrote in the site’s comments after midnight: “I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a ‘tip’ from one person and decided to make a story out of it. TechCrunch is full of shit, film at 11.”

Two interesting possible angles:

(i) The ability of "irresponsible bloggers" to ruin people and companies with poorly researched stories plays to all the biasses of the mainstream press. Online Libel law is still poorly developed, it will be interesting to see what CBS (Last.fm's owners) do, as a lot of people are threatening to turn away - and with other systems coming up (see graphic above), its not good timing.

(ii) The worrying amount of data possessed by various social networks, in the wrong hands, can be very dangerous - and its not clear that these companies will not hand it over for lucre, legal relief or other largesse.

No doubt the truth will unfold over the next few days - but as one of the commentators on the post notes, at real issue here is the core tenet of "whose data is it anyway?" Until users control their data, this will be a perennial issue.

Update - Second Set - Ars Tech notes the RIAA says that they have received no such data. Ball now in TechCrunch court....

Posted by Alan Patrick in Digital Media Web 2.0 at 23:21 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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It's not "irresponsible bloggers" - it's just plain old-fashioned bad journalism, Daily Mail-style.

One of my golden rules is that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered correctly with the word "no". Journalists use that style of headline because they know the story is probably false - if they had the sources and facts to back it up, they'd use a more assertive headline.

That, of course, is which the aforementioned Mail uses it so often - and why TechCrunch used it this time.

#1 Ian Betteridge (Homepage) on 2009-02-23 10:59 (Reply)

Its close to the wind though - this must be close to libel with material damages.

#2 alan p on 2009-02-23 11:17 (Reply)

Not under US law, where you have to demonstrate (basically) that it was malicious, rather than just factually inaccurate.

And suing would be a PR disaster for Last.fm. That's something that's rarely acknowledged these days - getting the legal guns out, even when totally in the right, is usually a disaster for any company when you're up against the media.

#3 Ian Betteridge (Homepage) on 2009-02-23 11:48 (Reply)

A libel suit is an expensive bad idea but...

Last.fm could sue in the UK, especially as the accusation implies they could be in breach of the Data Protection Act - that would qualify as "lowering them in the estimation of right-thinking members of society".

And in the US, they could argue that Techcrunch does not have the absence of malice defence given that Last.fm provided a rebuttal which directly contradicts the claim "Last.fm...actually handed the data over to the RIAA", complete with emphasising italics.

But, I'm not sure what the material damages really are. You'd have to equate the deleted scrobbles of non-paying users to value from a sizeable audience but probably one that is way smaller than Last.fm's potential audience. I'm guessing there are more people who like music recommendation services than those who care deeply about the machinations of Web 2.0 startups.

And ninthly, users can never entirely control their own data. I don't own the fact that I exist.

#3.1 Chris Edwards (Homepage) on 2009-02-23 12:21 (Reply)

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