The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

CBS buys Last.fm

CBS Corporation has purchased Last.fm. $280 million? Wow. (<nod target=”Metafilter” />).

I’m a last.fm subscriber and have been for quite some time. Many of my friends are there, but I don’t interact much with last.fm. I primarily just listen to music in my local iTunes Library and check out my charts on Last.fm. I wish last.fm was more feature rich, including on-the-fly updates of the Weekly Top Artists list. I am dubious as to whether AudioScrobbler/last.fm is worth $280 million.

I’m starting to get flashbacks of 2000. And I’m worried about 2008. Are we in for another implosion, like we had at the end of the dot.com bubble? The difference this time around is that IPO doesn’t seem to be a business model, but neither is profitability.

1. Start social networking site.
2. Raise venture capital money.
3. Garner large user base.
4. Get purchased by big player (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft)

Time to get busy upgrading my skills, just in case.

[…] Marc Andreessen, an undisputed Silicon Valley technology leader, addresses the Web 2.0 bubble misconception in an essay that has lots of great points. He mentions that all of us in the technology industry are a little gun shy, since many of us were hit very hard by the dot com crash of 2001. I even expressed some jitters with the recent buyout of Last.fm. […]