Two of Last.fm's founders, Martin Stiksel and Felix Miller. Photograph: Martin Godwin
Last.fm, one of the poster children of Britain's internet startup scene, has finally been bought by America's CBS for $280m - putting a stop to what seemed like endless speculation about the well-regarded site.
According to a piece by my esteemed colleague Jemima Kiss:
Leslie Moonves, the CBS chief executive, said: "Last.fm is one of the most well-established, fastest-growing online community networks out there. Their demographics also play perfectly to CBS' goal to attract younger viewers and listeners."
Last.fm is a music recommendation engine that "listens" to your music habits and then uses some analysis to determine other songs you might like. It claims around 20 million active users and is generally considered to be among the pioneers of Web 2.0.
Last year in the wake of the YouTube acquisition by Google, I wrote a long piece on the startup scene in Britain, which told the story of Last.fm's beginnings.
What it didn't detail, however, was that actually the Guardian played a pivotal role in the site's history - it turns out that an article here in 2003 by Ben Hammersley on the "scrobbling" application developed by student Richard Jones was read by the guys at the nascent Last.fm, who then met up with RJ and brought him on board - then used the system of listening to your music tastes to turn the service into what we know today.
