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CBS Acquires Last.fm
 CBS Corporation has acquired Last.fm, a global, community-based, music discovery network. The announcement was made Wednesday by Les Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corporation. CBS purchased the online social platform for $280 million in cash.
Last.fm currently has more than 15 million active users in more than 200 countries. The acquisition follows a number of CBS Interactive announcements including the purchase of Wallstrip.com, investments in Joost and Spot Runner and the recent expansion of the CBS Audience Network to include a total of 25 online partners.
"Last.fm is one of the most well established, fastest growing online community networks out there," said Moonves. "They have a great management team that understands how to build an engaged and passionate community where users learn, discover and share music globally. Their demographics also play perfectly to CBS’s goal to attract younger viewers and listeners across our businesses. Last.fm adds a terrific interactive extension to all of our properties and also is a huge step in CBS Corporation’s overall strategy of expanding our reach online to transition from a content company into an audience company."
As part of the acquisition, the Last.fm team, including founders Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel and Richard Jones, will continue to independently run the online network.
"We looked at a lot of companies to provide a base for CBS's investment in online reach, and found Last.fm to be poised at an inflection point — balancing fast growth, a sticky community and the opportunity for monetization that does not distract the user," said Quincy Smith, president, CBS Interactive.
"This is an exciting new opportunity for Last.fm" said Felix Miller, co-founder and CEO of the website. "We have been delighted with the way the site has grown in terms of users and the services we offer. CBS understood our strategy from the first meeting and realized how our platform could ultimately apply to all forms of media. Last.fm and CBS share a vision of intelligent, personalized media and smarter social networking. This partnership will help us push these innovations even further and provide huge benefits to our community. Together, Last.fm and CBS will offer a new way for people to consume media."
Added Moonves, "Music has the unique ability to unite large groups of people and engage them around a shared passion. Part of our interactive strategy has been to build communities around all of our properties. CBS Radio has given us a powerful way to create such communities for decades and it continues to do so. With Last.fm we're adding a next-generation platform to allow audiences to communicate with us and each other as never before."
Founded in 2002, Last.fm creates communities around music by bringing together listeners, artists and music. Through its "scrobbling" technology and social recommendation engine, Last.fm builds a profile of each user’s musical taste and leverages each user’s song list to make personalized recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams and other music related community features. In addition, the site has an "Events" listing that can recommend over 200,000 festival and music events globally.
This is CBS' second recent investment in Internet radio and streaming media as last month CBS announced that it is funding TargetSpot, Inc., an ad serving technology and marketplace for advertisers and Internet broadcasters. CBS Radio also announced that it will utilize the technology on its more than 100 music, Talk, Sports and News Radio stations broadcasting live online.
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