The End of Last.FM
Well, all good things must come to an end. Broadcasters and the RIAA are scrambling to get a grip on new ways to exploit the consumers of tomorrow and the straightest line at the moment is to buy a startup (in whatever state of development it's in, apparently) and have an instant connection to millions of users.
The most recent site to succumb is Last.FM. Alas, I'm still not 100% sure how the whole site works but they did create a nice layout and some cool applications (scrobbler, widgets, etc.) that I'd only just begun to use. I guess CBS saw the same potential and, rather than signing up as a new user, bought the whole damn thing.
With more and more people moving to the internet for entertainment plus the loss of Howard Stern last year, I'm sure CBS has to be looking for ways to shore up those streams of revenue. Just over the horizon is the new frontier of the world wide web and Last.FM already has a lot of early adapters already on board.
Hopefully, CBS will treat Last.FM like Google did Picasa and Blogspot. From a user standpoint, both of those have only gotten better. (Not sure of the impact to the developers themselves.) These could be the last days of a cool service for finding new music and people with similar tastes or it could be the beginning of a new phase in entertainment where the target market is more like the program manager.
Time will tell...
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1 comments:
I'd say there have been some improvements to Blogger, but also some things that are not as good. It's tougher now to really monkey around with templates, etc. Or so I've found.
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