Back to Tech Blog homepage“It’s a bummer.”
That’s how Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, described the departure of Last.fm’s three founders, Martin Stiksel, Felix Miller and Richard Jones.
CBS paid $280m in 2007 for Last.fm, an online music service and community now used by over 37m people a month. It remains one of the UK’s biggest buyouts in the web 2.0 era and Last.fm is still a fixture of London’s Silicon Roundabout.
Yet Mr Smith was magnanimous as three darlings of the web scene left CBS Interactive, which as a whole generated revenues of over $600m last year.
“You’re CBS Interactive, a division inside a major media company, trying to reconcile a big media business with start-up energy,” he says. “Whenever you lose a little balance of entrepreneurial energy, it’s painful and annoying. They are very good businessmen.”
But even though traffic has doubled in the last year, both Smith and Last.fm seem to admit that they are still working out how to make the most of the recent growth. “We’re certainly happy with what has been done so far, but this is about finding the right music strategy for the medium overall,” says Smith. “I’d argue none of us have figured that out – including the labels and other services.”
Miller says having 37m people on the site brings a “different kind of responsibility. We have to keep even more of an eye on the money. The big transition is becoming a business and a proper one. That has been the last year’s challenge and what we have set up the team to do… We’ve made a fairly good job of making ourselves redundant.”
Last.fm will appoint local managers, but leadership now moves to David Goodman, head of the newly formed CBS Interactive Music business, which includes Last.fm as well as CBS’s other digital radio units.
Whatever happens in the next stage of Last.fm’s evolution, its founders are proud of their achievements since starting the site in 2003 when Stiksel says “nobody wanted anything to do with online music. It’s quite amazing what has changed since then… The digital music revolution has really happened. Last.fm was one of the agents that brought this into being.”
The founders deny that their departure has anything to do with the travails of the ad-supported music market or the recent clash with Techcrunch over users’ data (both CBS and Last.fm have repeatedly denied passing listening data to record labels) – or indeed any earn out which may have come two years after the CBS acquisition.
“It has nothing to do with any tie-ins or handcuffs,” says Stiksel, who is looking forward to some time off.
While there are no concrete plans for a new business, they still see plenty of opportunity at the intersection between entertainment and online.
“The internet as a whole is far from finished,” says Stiksel. “A lot more work needs to be done.”
Tags: CBS, digital music, Last.fm, Music, siliconroundabout
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