This in reference to the accusations (1, 2) that Techcrunch made towards Last.fm, which have been criticised by many, not least by Last.fm and CBS itself. For those that haven’t been following it, accusations were raised at Last.fm for sharing (private) user-data with the RIAA, the US institution best known for suing old ladies for sharing music on their PCs. Recently, CBS/Last.fm issued another statement that these accusation are completely false. More recently, today in fact, news was released that the Last.fm founders quit. Now, I, as a blogger and not a media-person (there is a difference), don’t think that this last piece of circumstantial evidence bodes well for CBS/Last.fm.

Let’s first define media and truth as I think its relevant to the discussion. By media, I mean any publication that has it in their core-statutes (or whatever they are called) to inform the public as accurately and honestly as possible. This excludes blogs, in my opinion, as most of us have made no such agreements with our readers (sorry, guys!). Instead, some of us use it as a diary, others as a commentary, and others as a pseudo reporting service (on Tech IT Easy, we try to restrict ourselves to two and three). Techcrunch, on the other hand, while having started as a blog, can now easily be called an organisation reporting the news, with all the conditions that come with it.

Truth: in the media, truths are verifiable facts. You can verify facts in two ways. One, by quoting your source, preferably primary, short and simple. Two, by being a reputable source yourself. In other words, the Financial Times can tell us that an anonymous source has told them that Martians have visited the president and that statement will hold more value than if I told you that Martians have visited the president. Why? Because the Financial Times has more to lose than me (perhaps).

While Techcrunch is obviously not the 121-year old institution that is the Financial Times, it is in many ways it’s equivalent in this time of new online-focussed media. It has a lot to lose by giving out the wrong information. Techcrunch repeated its allegations several times even, without quoting sources I should mention, which leads me to believe them.

So why not trust CBS/Last.fm over Techcrunch? One, a corporation stating that it hasn’t done harm to its customers is simple self-preservation. Two, while I have been following Last.fm even before it was Last.fm, and while I actually find its founders very sympathetic, I think that they experienced the hypocrisy that corporations sometimes live by (it may be in their statutes even), and decided to quit. If this happened to my baby, I would quit too.

I am not saying that everything Techcrunch writes should be taken at their word (nor even the Financial Times), but as recent history has shown us, there is something wrong in the world of the music- and video-industry (you know, that other media-industry), and the only protection we regular people seem to have, is the media calling them out on the sometimes very nasty things they do. And while we should keep double- and tripple-checking the facts, if only to keep the Techcrunches et al. on their toes, if the RIAA is involved and a big company like CBS, I think I’ll side with public media.

End blog post.

Vincent

P.S. the irony: I think that CBS is also a news reporting organisation. However, in the case of the Last.fm “business unit,” it is not!

Like

Unlike

My sentiments about online media aside (I think it’s despicable the way media-companies treat consumers, particularly outside of the US), it has always bothered me to use Last.fm for a number of reasons. Here they are:

1. Last.fm, apart from being happy to pull my listening data into their site, does not integrate with my listening habits Whats.O.Ever. My method for managing music, perhaps determined by owning an iPod, is entirely dominated by iTunes and the usage of the device itself.




2. Last.fm does not play on the road (let’s ignore the iPhone radio app and that eventually all devices will be connected to the internet)




3. Last.fm does not acknowledge that I give different stars (= degrees of love) to songs (instead I have to “love” a song manually).




4. Discovering new music through Last.fm’s radio does not easily lead me to purchase the actual song




5. One cherry on top is that Last.fm now wants to charge me for using the radio, even though I add to it by playing my songs.




6. A second cherry on top is that Last.fm is now, indirectly through CBS, giving information about what we listen to and who we are, to the RIAA, a US organisation that probably also shares that information with other international organisations.




7. The only use Last.fm seems to have is vanity, in the sense that you can see what songs I loved (when I love them) and I can make pretty graphics of my listening habits (makes for an interesting poster).

So, as of this week, I am deleting my Last.fm account.

That doesn’t change that I am a fervent listener of music and it also doesn’t change that I believe deeply in the concept of sharing music. I like finding nice tracks to play at parties and equally I like finding tracks for some of my friends that I can only connect to online. There is no legal service that allows me to do this. As a matter of fact, in the Netherlands, I should even be paying a licensing fee if I play music in public or for too many people at once!!!

In comes Drop.io, a file-sharing service that recently added Facebook Connect as a way to share stuff only with your friends. Drop.io fills the void that Last.fm leaves in the following ways:

1. It has an integrated player that is very elegant and can also be accessed and added to via many different devices.




2. I can restrict access to my files to my Facebook friends only (evil internet lawyers can get lost).




3. It’s free for using 100 MB storage and charges a very fair $10 per gigabyte per year.




4. Any loss in statistical “vanity” data can be compensated by using iTunes and starring / sorting your files accordingly.

That’s it. Of course I will not be sharing songs that are copyright protected (and, of course, if we’re not Facebook connected, you will never know for sure )

Vincent

Like

Unlike