Oh this is probably not going to be good:

CBS Corp said on Wednesday it had paid $280 million in cash for the popular music social network service Last.fm.

CBS said in a statement the online service had more than 15 million active users in more than 200 countries and would fit well with its plans to attract younger viewers and transform it from a content company to an audience company.

I love Last.fm (aka Audioscrobbler), it’s one of the rare examples of a community site that found a niche and filled it well.  They’ve recently started expanding their feature set into events listsing and they’re providing a bunch of widgets for other sites.  They’ve also always had an extensive list of data feeds that could be consumed (and which I use for the latest album shown on my sidebar). 

I may be concerned for no reason, the article does say that

The Last.fm team will continue to run the online network under the terms of the deal and work with CBS to apply their community-building and technology expertise to extend CBS businesses online

And CBS has certainly seemed to embrace the new media: they show full episodes online, they have wikis, blogs & podcasts on their site. 

I just hope that the RIAA doesn’t use this as an opportunity to try an squeeze more money out of the site, like what they’ve done to Pandora. And I hope CBS is smart enough to not wreck a great site.

[tags]Last.fm, Music, CBS[/tags]