Last.fm officially respond to Techcrunch. Calls them “full of shit”.
Written on 23rd February 2009
15 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Techcrunch posted a story on Friday claiming Last.fm ‘may’ have given the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) a stack of user data. “So?” you say. Well, the RIAA could technically detect which specific users had listened to unreleased tracks, with particular reference to the U2 upcoming album which has recently been leaked.
In response, a Last.fm spokesperson told Techcrunch that to their knowledge no data had been made available to the RIAA.
Richard Jones , a co-founder, then commented on the blog post saying:
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.
Russ Garrett, a Last.fm systems architect also categorically denied the rumor in a Last.fm forum:
“I’d like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We’ve never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn’t consent to it. Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party – that goes against everything we stand for. As far as I’m concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up.”
Written on 19th August 2008





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