That Last.fm found a buyer isn’t really surprising at all. I’d been expecting that for some time, and if anything it’s overdue. They’ve been continually adding new features, like Events, that are always executed exceptionally well and they’ve built a huge community. Tens of thousands of people constantly and voluntarily submitting information about their musical preferences. What company wouldn’t be interested in that kind of marketing data? So the acquisition was a given, but CBS? At least with a Google or a Yahoo you know pretty much what to expect. Flickr and del.icio.us have both done reasonably well after joining up with Yahoo, or at least haven’t taken any turns for the worse. With CBS though, it’s a big unknown and one tends to assume the worst. What would a broadcast television company (read: dinosaur) do with a cutting edge social music web service? The Last.fm team seems pretty confident that it’ll work out well and that they’ll be able to continue as they were but with more resources, but then again they have 280 million reasons to be positive. It does seem likely though that they’ll be able to add even more music for streaming now, though they already had a fairly impressive amount given that they didn’t have much clout for licensing when they were going it alone. So here’s hoping it goes well. I’ve gotten pretty attached to Last.fm over the past couple years and I hope they don’t change their openness towards developers and their efforts to enable music geeks to frolic in streams of sweet, sweet data.