Last.fm, a music discovery and Internet radio service, owned by CBS and operating in several national markets, released downward-trending 2012 financials, as reported by The Guardian. Most of the blood spilled in the U.K., London-based Last’s home market, which saw revenue plummet 70%.
Some uplift was provided by U.S. use, which grew 22% on the earnings side. The U.S. is now Last.fm’s biggest revenue earner.
Last.fm is a highly social site that works with two linked apps — the listening platform and The Scrobbler, which is the music intelligence layer. Scrobbler tracks user selections and compares them with data sets belonging to other users, for a kind of auto-crowdsourcing of what you hear next. The company offers access to its technology via API (Application Programming Interface) to other music services.
CBS acquired the platform in 2007 for $280-million. Before that, Last had raised $5-million in venture funding (2006).
Would be interesting to understand how much of this drop reflects a decline in listening hours and how much a decline in RPM.
Just to confirm: the acquisition price in May ’07 was $280m.
David — thank you for catching that serious typo!