As you may all know CBS has bought lastfm for the monstrous sum of $280 million. While I think the people at lastfm definitely deserve to make a bundle of steaming hot cash for developing a brilliant service – it’s the only radio station I’ll ever need – the purchase also leaves me fearing the future of lastfm – at least from a European perspective.
I recently wrote about Pandora, that has been forced to limit access to North American IP adresses, and now I’m having a hard time thinking of a good reason why the same shouldn’t happen to lastfm. Lastfm used to be British. Since the purchase, it’s American. That means that lastfm now has the exact same legal issues that Pandora had, and will most likely be forced to block access for non-US IPs.
Man… between this, Pandora, iTunes movies not being available for European customers and the same going for BitTorrent, it sometimes kinda sucks to be European.