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.”

(more…)

lastfm, music, RIAA, TechCrunch

15 Comments »

RIAA takes down Muxtape, there must be a better solution

Written on 19th August 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

A wave of disbelieve rolled through the Next Web office today; one of our favorite music services – Muxtape – is down due to a problem with the RIAA (This is the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that represents the major labels of the recording industry in the United States). Yesterday I celebrated an interesting move by the giant media companies, as some of them had found an interesting compromise with YouTube. Instead of removing illegal videos, they claimed advertising space on the video pages.

But such a form of creativity isn’t yet reality in the world of online music services. Pandora has been facing threats of closure – due to ridiculous fees it has to pay for every song that would be played on their station. These fees might even threaten CBS’s LastFM.

Although the New York-based team believes the site will be back in a “brief period”, Muxtape seems to be offline for almost six hours now. There’s not much information, only a brief message on the Muxtape blog

No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.
Beta users of Muxtape For Bands: you are unaffected by this outage.

My guess is that the RIAA has found out about the “radio” function of Muxtape, and decided the start-up has to pay the fee as well. I wonder whether there are different ways of “sorting things out” than paying the damn money.

cbs, music, music industry, Muxtape, RIAA, youtube

4 Comments »