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Last.fm hit back at claims they handed user data to RIAA
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 24 February 2009
Last.fm has come out fighting after an article was posted on techie website TechCrunch on Friday night accusing the music service of handing over a load of user data to US music industry trade body the Recording Industry Association Of America.
Said data, which tracks the music being listened to by Last.fm subscribers, could be used by the RIAA to see who had been listening to pre-release music that is only currently available from non-legit sources on the internet.
The TechCrunch article suggested the trade body were interested in who had been listening to leaks of the new U2 album, which has been doing the rounds on the net for a couple of weeks now even though it’s not actually released until next week (though there are legit streams of it available via MySpace and Spotify).
CBS-owned Last.fm quickly issued an official denial of the story, and shortly afterwards one of the founders of the service, Richard Jones, posted a short rant online, writing: “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”.
With Jones and his colleagues, obviously aware of the damage the story could do to their company’s reputation, posting other rebuttals on both TechCrunch’s message boards and their own blogs, another Last.fm-er, Russ Garrett, wrote on the service’s own 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”.
Given that the RIAA has now come out and confirmed it never even asked Last.fm for user data, it seems that Techcrunch did get it wrong on this one. As previously reported, one of the reasons U2’s new album is available in so many illegal places on the net is because the Australian branch of their record company, Universal, put it live on a legit download platform by mistake last week.
