Iris is scrobbling…

Posted: May 26 2009 by John Noel in People

Iris scrobbles from 18th May — 25th May 2009

From the eclectic son­ics of stu­dio to the far east­ern drawls of digital, Iris is a var­ied place when it comes to music and so you know we’re not bluff­ing, we’ve set up a Last.fm group to show­case just some of our tastes. You may occa­sion­ally spot the odd 90’s “clas­sic” in there – some­times we just can’t help ourselves on a Fri­day afternoon.

…while Last.fm and Tech­Crunch are squabbling

Speak­ing of Fri­days, a long deceased story regard­ing Last.fm was summoned from the grave regard­ing the rumour that Last.fm shared user data with the oft vil­i­fied Record­ing Industry Asso­ci­ation of Amer­ica (RIAA). Ori­gin­at­ing from a post by Erick Schon­feld of Tech­Crunch detail­ing the canard. Last.fm quickly and cat­egor­ic­ally denied the accus­a­tions and pos­ted their rebut­tal with the firebrand title of “Tech­Crunch are full of shit”. The furore raged for untold eons (a couple of days) before every­one decided to get on with their lives. That was until one of TIME Magazine’s most influ­en­tial people of 2008 and owner of Tech­Crunch Michael Arring­ton fired back with another unsub­stan­ti­ated post on the topic, this time with added screenshot!

For those unfa­mil­iar with Last.fm: the ser­vice records the listen­ing habits of users (so called “scrob­bling”) and recom­mends related tracks, events and videos. So far so benign, how­ever if someone is listen­ing to unre­leased music, say from an illi­citly down­loaded album, then this kind of inform­a­tion might be of interest to those wish­ing to curb that kind of activ­ity. The first Tech­Crunch art­icle claimed that Last.fm made user iden­ti­fi­able data (i.e. which user was listen­ing to what) avail­able to the RIAA. The second Tech­Crunch art­icle built on the first and claimed that Last.fm had sup­plied data to their par­ent com­pany CBS (one of those pesky media con­glom­er­ates from the US) who in turn sup­plied it to the RIAA. This – like the claims made in the first art­icle – have been unequi­voc­ally denied by Last.fm.

Man­i­fold aspects make this story inter­est­ing to a cas­ual bystander: mostly the increas­ingly per­sonal spat between Tech­Crunch and Last.fm. Like an overly melo­dra­matic soap opera, the idea of petty cat fights and con­tor­ted pos­tur­ing is much too enti­cing to ignore. As is most often the case with journ­al­istic and opin­ion blogs, the real meat of the story doesn’t begin until the com­ments, and with both Arring­ton and not­able Last.fm developer Russ Gar­rett chim­ing in, the responses are just as enthralling. The most recent rebut­tal by Last.fm brings the hub­bub to a stale­mate with Arring­ton and Tech­Crunch seem­ingly unwill­ing to provide con­clus­ive proof from their whistleblower(s) and Last.fm unyield­ing in their mes­sage that this never happened.

With nowhere to go from there, responses devolve into dis­sec­tion and spec­u­la­tion with most insights com­ing from impar­tial out­side observ­ers such as Slash­dot with talk of Tech­Crunch being sponsored by one of Last.fm’s com­pet­it­ors. News then came from the Last.fm for­ums that Tech­Crunch was prun­ing and shap­ing com­ments, with dis­sent being swiftly deleted – hardly a damning indict­ment but it added com­bus­tion to the already volat­ile situation.

No mat­ter which side of the argu­ment you side with, it’s easy to be absorbed by a story like this. It has the vil­lain: the RIAA, liti­gi­ous and pro­voc­at­ive; the upstart: Last.fm with their indie cre­den­tials and frank con­ver­sa­tion; the pugil­ist: Michael Arring­ton who has more clout and influ­ence than is healthy for one per­son; and the mys­tery: whether Last.fm really did break data pro­tec­tion laws and betray the trust of their users by trans­fer­ring data to the vil­lain. Last.fm were always bound to deny these accus­a­tions, giv­ing quarter to any part of the story’s truth­ful­ness would drastic­ally under­mine their repu­ta­tion and at worst, open them up for lit­ig­a­tion for breach­ing UK data pro­tec­tion and pri­vacy laws. The first story by Tech­Crunch was always pur­por­ted as rumour, it wasn’t until the second story was pub­lished that legit­im­acy became the cent­ral issue. The resources and net­work­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies of Michael Arring­ton are not to be under­es­tim­ated, and des­pite lack­ing any kind of formal journ­al­ism qual­i­fic­a­tion, his abil­ity to be in con­tact with con­cerned parties is not in question.

Arring­ton him­self can some­times be a light­ning rod for con­tro­versy with high pro­file rows and incen­di­ary posts com­mon, there’s a case for it simply going with the ter­rit­ory and another for act­ively atten­tion seek­ing. He is an easy man to dis­like upon curs­ory read­ing but his chutzpah, drive and intel­li­gence should be emu­lated more often than avoided.

So where does this leave every­one con­cerned? It seems unreal­istic that Tech­Crunch would cook two stor­ies about the same topic, while at the same time it seems point­less that Last.fm would hand over data, will­ingly or not, when its use­ful­ness for any­thing other than aggreg­ate stat­ist­ics is in ques­tion; not to men­tion the legal rami­fic­a­tions for Last.fm being a data holder in the eyes of Data Pro­tec­tion legis­la­tion. It’s dif­fi­cult not to assume that Michael Arring­ton has some sort of agenda to this kind of heavy­weight snip­ing, espe­cially given the flimsy, hearsay evid­ence presen­ted as so far – we have only his word that his source(s) have con­clus­ive proof of wrong­do­ing. Were there any merit to either side’s claims, swift legal action would likely be involved with either slander from the Last.fm camp or a pri­vacy invest­ig­a­tion from the Tech­Crunch corner.

Either way, I’m still going to get musical recom­mend­a­tions from Last.fm and daily updates on web star­tups from Tech­Crunch; neither has done any­thing, rumoured or oth­er­wise, egre­gious enough for me to cease using their ser­vices. As for the story: it provides a per­fect spring­board for explor­ing issues of pri­vacy and the res­ult of a wholly online pres­ence but if both parties refuse to reveal their hand, then an impasse this will remain.