I’ll be honest and admit that I never really understood what was so great about Last.fm.  It’s a music community website based out of the UK that allows users to track their listening habits.  Users can then share their musical listening habits with others on social networks or on blogs.  I remember installing a WordPress plugin that displayed the recent albums that I’ve listened to on my iPod or in iTunes.

I quickly realized that I was rightfully embarrassed by my own musical tastes and promptly deleted the plugin.  I don’t need the whole world knowing just how fond I am of 80’s new wave music.

It now appears that Last.fm wasn’t only making this information available to it’s users, but to the The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as well.

From TechCrunch:

Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too.

I didn’t even know that CBS owned Last.fm.  I’m sure that if I ever bothered to read the Last.fm user agreement, that tidbit of information was embedded deep in the fine print. 

If this is truly, it’s truly a scummy thing to do on the part of CBS. Not that this would be the first scummy things they ever did.