Last.fm Strongly Denies Sharing Data With RIAA

bonch writes "Last.fm and CBS vehemently deny sharing any user data with the RIAA, contrary to previous reports. One anonymous party calls it 'irresponsible journalism,' and Last.fm goes so far as to suggest it is a target of slander. Carla Duckworth of the RIAA confirmed, 'We've made no such request for this information.'"

Comments

Hmmm, Credibility....

[Bob9113]

So, who do I trust more:

1. The RIAA PR person, the CBS PR person, and the Last.fm PR person.
-- or --
2. A completely unverifiable source who may have an axe to grind or other nefarious motive for completely fabricating the story.

Frankly, it's a tough call.

Re:RIAA also says

[sopssa]

I'm actually siding with Last.FM here, just for the reason that TechCrunch deleted mine and many others comments if it was about *anything* against their view or if you defended last.fm. The most recent article about last.fm downtime was also hilarious try to make bad comments about them (and see the writers comments in that article :). Now, I do not know anything about which side is valid. But by far last.fm has answered questions and what they have been accused of, while TechCrunch keeps removing comments that dont side with them. For me that says something.

TechCrunch and Pandora

[meehawl]

Pandora's main competition for mindshare is Last.FM. There's also a bit of a US/EU rivalry, with Pandora so strongly identified with the US and, with the Valley in particular, while Last.FM came out of a Euro milieu. I think I've noticed a very pro-Pandora coverage pattern at TechCrunch. Lots of the "Web 2 - Me Too" AdSense spam sites, sorry, gadget/tech blogs, take cues from TechCrunch, and among the iPhone-toting, US-centric crowd, Pandora is a darling.

Before I'd believe anything TechCrunch said about Last.FM, I'd want to know more about the personal and financial connections between the people running TechCrunch and the people running Pandora.

Personally, I've tried Pandora every years and it fails, epically, to even know about many of the artists I am interested in hearing. Plus, Pandora's Flash interface is just aggravating, user-hostile, and screams hipster-designer-marketroid-douchbags-in-control.

Re:From the Article:

[Allicorn]

Whilst I must salute some quality semantic pedantry there - hats off! - if you read the extensive statements, blog posts and forum messages of the Last.fm team in response to this issue you'll see that there is no "wiggle room" in their wording. They have emphatically denied this in absolutely every sense that some data might have gone somewhere.

So, Last.fm have denied it. CBS have denied it. The RIAA have denied it.

TechCrunch have provided no evidence of any kind. What they have come out with is a long-running stream of unsupported, often transparently vitriolic whinges, whines and allegations about Last.fm with never a scrap of evidence or a hint at how they'd have access to it if there ever were any.

Add to that the fact that the original allegation makes no sense anyway since scrobbler data (containing a list of the track- & artist-name ID3 tags of the media files you've played... tags which are freely editable) would seem to be of no value as either evidence of "theft" or probable cause for further discovery of evidence. This data doesn't say where the track name came from - only that you played a media file with that label. Bought/resold/leant/borrowed/mislabelled... the genuine explanations are endless and nothing in the data should be grounds for any suspicion of "piracy".

What you end up with is a picture that seems to suggest there's whilst there's definitely a lying douchebag of RIAA-standard involved in this story... it's probably not the RIAA for once.