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Business News Digital
More allegations over Last.fm user data
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 27 May 2009
TechCrunch has again claimed that Last.fm is handing over user-data to the Recording Industry Association Of America in violation of its own privacy code, though the CBS-owned music service continues to deny it is doing any such thing.
Such data could be useful to the RIAA because they could see which Last.fm subscribers were listening to music ahead of its official online release – if they were, those users must have accessed the music from unofficial sources (well, either that or they’re journalists or label staff or friends or family of the band). As previously reported, as the record industry slowly comes to terms with the fact that rampant online piracy is now just a fact of life, label bosses remain extra sensitive when new music appears on file-sharing networks before it has been officially serviced even to radio – even though pretty much any album anyone is interested in leaks in this way these days. Labels argue such leaks screw up their marketing plans, and impact on sales in the all-important first week of release.
After an earlier TechCrunch story alleging Last.fm was colluding with the RIAA, something bosses at the London-based music service quickly denied, now the IT website has suggested that the collusion is between parent company CBS and the US record label trade body. They allege CBS asked for Last.fm user data for internal use, but then handed said data over to the RIAA.
Last.fm continue to deny any of their user data has reached the record label trade body.
It has to be said that, given Last.fm’s privacy commitments to users, any data handed over to the RIAA presumably couldn’t be used in court if the trade body decided to pursue copyright infringement litigation against any users who they reckoned were illegally accessing pre-release content, so you wonder why they’d want it in the first place. They could, I suppose, amass other evidence once they had identified users who consistently listen to pre-release music, or claim they had simply accessed a user’s listening data from their publicly available Last.fm profile – which would work assuming the user wasn’t deleting obviously illegally accessed track data from their public profile.
