According to what might or might not have been a rumour circulating back in February, Last.fm handed over listening data to the RIAA. (Now, I assume that we can all imagine why the RIAA would be interested in obtaining data concerning albums that have yet to be published.)
I didn’t think much of it at the time. Last.fm of course denied the whole thing and as always with these kinds of accusations it was kind of hard to know who was telling the truth. Yesterday, I received a link from a friend to a new article which now claims to know a bit more about what actually happened.
I suggest you read the two original articles if you haven’t already and make up your own mind.
I’ve been using Last.fm since 2005 and I’ve always rather liked the service. But if the article has the truth of it, I don’t know if I feel comfortable staying. Not that I have anything to hide, but hey, who wants a company who is giving out personal data to others? It’s the principle of the thing..
Two alternatives were mentioned in the comment threads, JamWee which is still on beta with invites scheduled to be send out sometime in June and Libre.fm which is still in alpha but can import your entire Last.fm history and promises to focus on privacy.
I’ve signed up for JamWee and will give it a try as soon as they launch. Libre.fm also looks interesting, so I’ll probably give that a try as well. Not that I’ve decided to abandon Last.fm (yet) but maybe it’s time to have a look around what other options there are out there.
I’ll let you know what I think of both JamWee and Libre.fm as soon as I’ve gotten around to testing them!