The last.fm staff posted a small announcement that they are now independent. I've been on last.fm since 2008 and didn't realize they were owned by the CBS corporation that entire time. Apparently CBS bought last.fm in 2007. In that post about the acquisition is this line
CBS understands the Last.fm vision, the importance we place on putting the listener in charge, the vibrant and vocal community, the obsession with music stats, and our determination to offer every song ever recorded.
I imagine last.fm had huge ambitions in their early days. There was no Spotify or major streaming services at that time, so they were in a potential position to become the central place where people came to listen to and discover music.
Looking back at my own music habits at that time, I was either spending money in iTunes to buy albums or individual tracks for $0.99, but that was also locking me into the Apple ecosystem because all music on iTunes was protected with DRM (they later introduced music without DRM and thus increased the price to $1.29, which is still the price to this day). I remember signing up for last.fm for the ability to internet radio streaming and discovering music. It was pretty unimpressive looking back, but at the time it felt amazing.
I haven't used last.fm much since then, I had a brief time from 2014-2016 where I had scrobbling set up with Spotify, but something broke and I never noticed or bothered to fix it. With this announcement of them becoming independent, it's reignited my interest in scrobbling and tracking the music I'm listening to. I've also been working on moving away from Spotify and going back to manually managing my music like its the year 2006.
Here is my last.fm profile: https://www.last.fm/user/jmanator