Digital

Last.fm losses increase

By | Published on Wednesday 11 January 2012

Last.fm

The Register has noted that Last.fm’s losses almost doubled to £5 million in 2010, despite efforts to cut back on the digital platform’s more expensive-to-run elements, such as on-demand streaming.

Of course few digital music platforms which aren’t based around conventional a la carte download sales are making any money, in Europe or the US, though The Register has honed in on the CBS-owned Shoreditch-based Last.fm because it was used by David Cameron last year as a demonstration of all the vibrant digital entrepreneurialism going down in East London.

Some are cynical about how much the Coalition government has been hyping up Shoreditch as the home of some kind of digital-based economic revolution, and critical of how much government money is being pumped in to maintain the hype, arguing that many of the digital start-ups operating in the area will probably fail once venture capital runs out.

The Register seemingly sees Last.fm, one of East London’s longest established digital start-ups, as an example of a company living on hype alone, noting that its original founders made millions when they sold out to CBS in 2007, but that it’s still not clear how the digital service will ever make money long term, however much music fans still love to scrobble.

Read The Register piece here.



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