Last.fm, the UK-based music startup acquired by media giant CBS in 2007 for $280m (£140m), made a loss for 2009 of just under $4.45 million (£2.84 million), reveal new accounts for the company. The loss posted in 2008 was £17.11 million, reflecting the high costs of streaming music, which the company has now cut. It just goes to show how expensive streaming can be…
Financials published on the UK’s Companies House show the company ended last year with net liabilities of £22.24 million, but parent company CBS is still effectively subsidising the company and will “make available such funds as are needed”. We’re hoping that CBS is getting some value out of this relationship.
Over 54% of Last.fm’s revenues in 2009 were from the UK, 33.5% from the US, 9.4% from EU countries, and 2.3% from the rest of the world.
That’s a gain on US users but the question is, is it enough to sustain CBS as a sugar daddy? → Read More
Navigating the choppy waters of ad-supported music, We7 hasn’t been afraid to change course. The UK startup began life as an innovative free music download service before transitioning to an on-demand browser-based offering. While most recently the company, which is backed by Peter Gabriel, Eden Venture and Spark Ventures, made a premium paid-for play with a desktop and mobile version sans-advertising.
Today, We7 is shifting focus once again in the belief that the route to mass market requires a lean-back experience more akin to Internet radio services like Pandora in the U.S. rather than a pure on-demand play such as European competitor Spotify. It’s also a model that sits more comfortably with We7′s ad-supported aspirations since music licensing fees for Internet radio are about a third of that charged for non subscription on-demand services. → Read More
Is it possible to make online ads “sticky” so that users engage with them longer? That’s the aim of a new partnership between CBS-owned Last.fm and MXP4, the interactive music startup.
Using MXP4′s technology, Last.fm is to begin offering brands the option to create ads that users of the music streaming and discovery service can interact with, such as remixing a track in realtime or “singing along in karaoke mode”, all within the ad itself. In a way it’s similar in concept to Apple’s new iAds in the sense that ads become fully blown apps. And obviously, a music oriented app is a perfect fit for Last.fm. → Read More
If you’ve created music playlists using iTunes, Spotify, Last.fm, YouTube, We Are Hunted, Winamp, Rhapsody, Soundcloud, or even if you’ve simply scribbled a list of your favorite tracks in a notepad file, you need to check out Playlistify soon. The basic, solid premise of the service is to let you enjoy your custom-made playlists anywhere you like.
I was looking for an excuse to write it up anyway, and now they’ve given me a decent one: they’ve added a new feature that lets you convert your music playlists into Twitter lists. → Read More
Digital music company eMusic is rumored to be up for sale, according to various reports, but that hasn’t stopped it from signing licensing deals with big music. This morning, eMusic announced that it come to an agreement with Warner Music Group and that it will soon begin selling tracks from WMG’s roster of artists to its U.S. users.
eMusic last year inked a similar deal with Sony Music Entertainment.
The agreement includes titles from WMG’s Atlantic Records, Rhino Records and Warner Bros. Records as well as from independent labels distributed through WMG’s Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA) stable that are not currently sold on eMusic. The deal will make 10,000 catalog albums from artists like REM, Depeche Mode and Aretha Franklin available for downloading, but does not include newer hit records. → Read More
I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do). Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most from this inclination since it’s not weighed down by music files, thus saving me tons of space and virus headaches (you eMule users know what I’m talking about). Anyhow, if I do choose to download music, I can always do it over at iTunes or my favorite place in the web: Jamendo.
Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage. → Read More
I’ve been in London for two weeks pretending to be part of the Traveling Geeks contingent of bloggers. But really I’ve been doing some deep investigative work on this whole Last.fm scandal.
II showed up at their offices and guess what I found? A pile of servers sitting in a corner waiting to be delivered to the RIAA. Sure, they said they were just old servers… likely story.
I also discovered that Last.fm is getting into a new business: Michael Arrington Target Practice Kits ™. I got a demo in the office (see video after the jump). Ev, can I put you down for a case? → Read More
Flexing their journalistic muscles, the crew at Joystiq have details surrounding Last.fm’s arrival onto Xbox Live, which was announced at E3 this year. It shouldn’t come as a surprise by now, but Gold members will have 24-hour access to the service that’s ad supported for free. → Read More
Last.fm founders Felix Miller, Richard Jones, and Martin Stiksel are leaving the music service they founded in 2002 and sold to CBS for $280 million in 2007.
In a notice on the site’s blog, Miller writes about the company’s humble beginnings and its journey to CBS, as well as its continued growth since the acquisition:
After two years running Last.fm within CBS we feel the time is right to begin the process of handing over the reins. 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.
It’s been a privilege working with the incredible team here in our London office, and we’re extremely proud of what we’ve achieved together. 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), and we’re confident the site will continue to go from strength to strength
Music service Last.fm, which was bragging about server uptime a week and a half ago, shuts its doors for the afternoon, claiming “datacenter temperature issues beyond our control” required them to go offline. The outage began around 12:30 pm PST, so we’re at two hours and counting. Updates are on their Twitter account. → Read More
A couple of months ago Erick Schonfeld wrote a post titled “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?” based on a source that has proved to be very reliable in the past. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter.
Before posting Erick reached out to the RIAA, Last.fm and parent company CBS for comments. The only response was from CBS – “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.” The CBS spokesperson, Katie Gunion, subsequently emailed us to say “would you please attribute the statement to Last.fm, it is currently reading as though CBS issued the statement” Gunion’s email lists her title as Public Relations, CBS Interactive, and her first statement did not name Last.fm (this is important, see below). A subsequent statement by Shannon Jacobs, VP of Communications at CBS: “this is a last.fm issue, as far as I am concerned. It is not a corporate issue. This is a last.fm issue, not a corporate issue. The posting represents last.fm’s response.”
After the story broke all concerned parties had no problem commenting publicly.
Last.fm cofounder Richard Jones said “I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.” He followed up with a blog post “Techcrunch are full of shit, “I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we’re denying it on our blog.” One blog called us a “tabloid masquerading as a legitimate news outlet.” Lots of others piled on.
Apart from updating the original post we’ve been quiet on this story. The person who first leaked the news was terminated from CBS for the leak, says our original source, and threatened with legal action. He understandably went very quiet. But the outrageously shrill denials by Last.fm just didn’t ring true. Once you got past the personal attacks, the denial language itself was too carefully worded.
Now we’ve located another source for the story, someone who’s very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta, when they said Erick’s story wasn’t correct.
Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too. → Read More
And so it goes. Last.fm, which just went to a pay-to-play model, is shutting down mobile streaming due to “licensing agreements.” This means unofficial Last.fm scrobbling and streaming apps will now be verboten – although for how long and to what degree are not clear. The service will now cost 3 euros per month to users outside of the UK, US, and Germany and current subscribers will receive a 30-track trial. Interestingly, the mobile changes actually address some non-public API calls that allowed software makers to stream Last.fm content relatively unpreturbed. The company said in a blog posting that these APIs will be closed. → Read More
Radionomy, based out of Brussels, Belgium (yes we do have a startup scene here), has secured more funding in order to bring more enhancements to and enable scale for its personalized web radio application, which it is debuting in public beta today.
The size of the financing round wasn’t shared in detail, but the startup did say its total capital now exceeds €1.5 million (roughly $2 million).
Radionomy essentially offers everyone a chance to set up their own Internet radio station free of charge and share a personalized radio show complete with music programming, jingles and commercials with friends and the rest of the world. Users get to tap into readily available music libraries and jingles and add custom sequences, interviews, reports and podcasts to the mix, enabling anyone to build a genuinely personalized radio show and broadcast it for free, worldwide. Radionomy takes care of the associated costs (including royalties), and shares advertising revenue with radio station creators, relative to the size of their audience. Read more about the project, which is European in scope, right here → Read More
Big Media’s love affair with the Internet ebbs and flows with the markets. When they see money pouring into Web startups, they feel threatened and rush to do the same. They ramp up their digital divisions, which usually are no more than venture arms, and hope to strike it rich. When the markets are down, as they are now, their attention drifts elsewhere—exactly at the time when they can pick up innovation on the cheap.
“M&A is gone,” the digital media chief at one of the largest media companies tells me. Other than a few targeted acquisitions to fill out business or technology holes, “you look foolish making any purchases,” he says, “especially if prices are still going down.”
And those prices are way down. Consider, for example, that CBS’s entire market capitalization is now only $2.5 billion, which is not much more than the $2.1 billion its digital division CBS Interactive paid in cash over the past two years for Cnet ($1.8 billion) and Last.fm ($280 million). (It also made a number of other smaller acquisitions and investments). As of December 31, 2008, CBS only had $419 million in cash on its balance sheet. → Read More
Mobile VoIP and IM service fring, one of the more popular mobile communication services around, is experimenting with porting a bunch of third-party apps to the fring client and will be announcing a number of those in the course of this year. Today, fring is launching a custom mobile-optimized Last.fm music radio add-on that brings a lot of the music recommendation service to the fring client but also integrates with the latter’s social and communication features.
Fring users (also referred to as fringsters) are now able to fire up streamed music radio channels, including their own Last.fm library, tag favourites, ban disliked tracks, view album artwork and basically take their Last.fm music account mobile. In addition to getting those features into the client, fringsters can also opt to view in real-time what their contacts are currently listening to, with the help of a friends list embedded into the Last.fm add-on. → Read More
Music recommendation engine / social network Last.fm has launched an official, feature-rich application for the Android platform that enables users to stream radio stations (including personalized streaming radio), consult up-to-date concert information and also offers the ability to track users’ listening habits based on their Last.fm profile.
The company says the application should be available here, but I’m not seeing anything there yet so maybe we should just be patient until they get around to effectively have the app up for download on Android Market. (It’s also nowhere to be found when you actually search from the G1).
Update: it’s available from the phone now.
The application enables users to access their Last.fm profile and millions of streaming tracks on Android-powered phones, and supports ‘background playback’ so you can listen to music while you access other programs. → Read More
MOG demo’d the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far.
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.
All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009. → Read More
Just in via Twitter: Pandora has registered its 20 millionth user. The three-year old music streaming service is trying to hold its own despite tough economics and recent layoffs.
Its music-recommendation engine pumps out personalized radio stations over the Web, and its iPhone app remains one the top free apps on iTunes (currently No. 21). → Read More
Today, CBS Interactive is laying off people across several of its properties, I’ve confirmed with the company. CBS is not saying which divisions or how many people are affected. It is positioning the layoffs as part of the integration process it began six months ago when it bought CNET for $1.8 billion. But it is not just the CNET businesses that are being cut.
I’ve also confirmed that earlier today employees at social music site Last.FM were let go. CBS bought Last.fm in 2007 for $280 million. One source puts the number of layoffs at as many as 40 people, mostly from LAst.FM’s London HQ, which has a total staff of 95. A spokesperson for CBS Interactive says that number is inaccurate on the high side, but won’t provide the correct number. In any case, it is likely a small fraction of the overall number of employees being laid off across CBS Interactive. Update: CBS says the number of Last.fm layoffs is less than 20, which would put it at about 20 percent. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
