The Truth Behind Last.fm Story: Techcrunch conned?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/28/not-safe-for-work-last-fm

85 34 17 years ago

guardian.co.uk

CalmQuiet• 17 years ago

The truth is that "there's no story". Because somebody (everybody?) is stonewalling.

Paul Carr provides a good summary of what (impaired) journalistic-like investigation has been done so far.

I don't follow Carr, but glanced around the guardian.co.uk page and noticed that the 3rd "most followed stories" was, "Woman may have kept mother's body in freezer for 20 years." Ah. Well, I guess Guardian is not exactly targeting HN readers.

intranation• 17 years ago

The Guardian is one of the UK's biggest newspapers, and is generally known for being tech savvy. This is a decent "elevator pitch" summing up of the story for the Guardian's typical audience.

danw• 17 years ago

The Guardian is a good source and certainly understand tech the best of UK newspapers (they have an api, post the raw data used in articles, host barcamps/hackdays, etc).

Carr on the other hand is know for bitter opinion pieces, such as this one about the Le Web conference http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/10/startups-in...

windsurfer• 17 years ago

Wake me when it's all over. It's just too much.

bep• 17 years ago

Great post. I won't hold my breath to see it linked on techcrunch

jonknee• 17 years ago

Great post? He basically said, "He said, she said, he said again, she said again and we don't don't know what happened." Which is what everyone already knew.

cake• 17 years ago

Exactly : weak article !

Instead of giving a factual opinion, he's biaised because, well, Last.fm are his friends and TC are his friends too.

It seems like he doesn't want to be in conflict with any of them.

boundlessdreamz• 17 years ago

Arrington linked to it from his twitter a/c. That's where I picked it up

http://twitter.com/arrington/status/1949086115

daleharvey5• 17 years ago

I dont like the implication that techcrunch and last.fm are both equally innocent victims in this.

techcrunch's traffic no doubt rose well above average during the whole affair, they have a few detractors questioning their legitimacy, but where are they? techcrunch deleted every comment that wasnt calling for the death of last.fm from each post.

whereas last.fm, they may have had some extra traffic, but they have had quite a few people deleting accounts, 3 posts on the worlds largest(?) tech blog along with threads on slashdot and a long list of people in their own forum worrying about being sued for using last.fm.

combine that with the ridiculous practice of posting these attacks on friday nights and the fact that techcrunch were the only people to hear from this tipster, its hard to pass off techcrunch as the innocent victim.

pg3• 17 years ago

I doubt very much that TC deliberately posted their stories on friday night. Those guys don't distinguish between days, and I think they forget that anyone else does.

daleharvey5• 17 years ago

the first time fair enough but I find it hard to believe after doing it the first time, and being called out on it, That they werent remotely aware of the timing the second time round.

even if they were completely oblivious, that doesnt make it right / fair.

It follows my original point, techcrunch are wielding the ability to do serious damage to companies and the best last.fm can hope for is damage limitation, no matter if they are completely in the right.

alain94040• 17 years ago

When you have a scoop, you publish it. You don't think: "oh well, it's getting late on Friday, let's wait until Monday when every other news media outlet has a chance to cover this as well".

So the "Friday allegation", to me, is completely misguided.

The denials have been pretty suspicious actually, at least the way TechCrunch and the Guardian report them. Over the years, I got used to reading between the lines.

When a famous athlete says "the allegations about my doping in magazine XYZ are completely false", it's not a denial. It's a carefully crafted statement to avoid any legal problems. If the athlete says "I never took drug XYZ", then that's a much stronger statement.

In geek terms, the first statement is a "nop". The second one is either true or false (0 or 1).

jhancock• 17 years ago

If you want to be considered legit, when you have a scoop, you investigate before considering publication.

froo• 17 years ago

Well the thing that got me was there was an assertion in the email that the last.fm employee was concerned about how not handing over the data would affect their rates - which sounded like the data could possibly be have handed directly to one of the record companies in question, which then found its way into the hands of the RIAA.

So, in that respect, CBS's simple denial stating that they never handed data over to the RIAA is accurate - because they worded it that way, that doesn't mean that they didn't know that that the data ended up in the hands of the RIAA.

So to visualise it, it would look like.

last.fm > cbs > record label > riaa

That way, all of the denials by last.fm and CBS would be "true" and yet, the TC story would still be fundamentally "accurate".

(EDIT - This is just speculation on my part from all of the information I've read. I'd have to side with TC because I doubt TC would publish several stories on the matter, months apart, if there wasn't even a hint of truth to the matter. I'd definitely trust the credibility of Arrington anyday over that of your average PR representative.)

kyro• 17 years ago

Sure, you publish a scoop when it's about 'OMG, COULD THIS BE A SNEAK PEEK OF GOOGLE NUCLEAR?!' You don't publish a scoop that could potentially cause quite a bit of damage to a company's image, resulting in a potential loss of business. That's not to say TC/last.fm are right or wrong, but you've got to, for at least a second, think about the implications of what you're going to publish, regardless of wanting to be the first to cover a story.

daleharvey5• 17 years ago

russ's denial was pretty categorical

* Last.fm has never given data linking IP addresses and scrobbles to any third party.

* Last.fm has never given data linking IP addresses and scrobbles to CBS (who, by the way, we don't consider a third party, but who do have to uphold our privacy policy).

considering he hadnt been asked to respond before the article was published, and posted that within a few hours of the article going live, i mean, what more can you ask for?

ksvs• 17 years ago

"techcrunch's traffic no doubt rose well above average during the whole affair"

Hmm, let's check:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/techcrunch.com/

Nope, it was down that month.

daleharvey5• 17 years ago

how can you tell, may hasnt finished?

besides if you wanted to check the stats it would need to be on a per article basis, theres too much traffic to try and extrapolate trends on a month by month basis.

to be fair it was a guess, but I would still be surprised if they werent among the most popular articles.

cdibona2• 17 years ago

I would only say that I can't imagine that Last.fm lost any users due to the TC story. The intersection of the users of Last.fm and those that would read, believe and act on this TC story are probably pretty scant.

That said, this recap in the guardian is pretty lame. What's with finding it so awful that last.fm doesn't have dedicated PR staff. It's not so terrible to let engineers talk with non-engineers.

alextp• 17 years ago

At least three friends of mine, in Brazil, deleted their last.fm accounts upon reading the last TC post. The FUD worked.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

2 big points im not sure he addressed.

- TC originally explicitly accused Last of handing over the data. Which everyone agrees now didnt happen. So probably Last's original "TC are full of shit" response could be considered partially fair?

- This "source" has just disappeared? That's interesting... not wanting to sound like I am accusing TC but it's more than a tad suspicious. Has someome been leading them along? Sounds a bit like it to me!

Otherwise good article :D

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

What baffles me is how incredibly incompetent the PR operation of CBS is. This is after all one of the biggest media companies in the world.

Instead of issuing an unequivocal joint CBS+Last denial, they keep stressing how unimportant a source blogs are. This isn't just a matter of truth but also one of professionalism. It's yet more evidence that media companies have been living under a stone for many years and any startup should avoid ending up in the claws of one of those.

The Truth Behind Last.fm Story: Techcrunch conned?

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