CBS swallows MusicMobs

Musicmobs, the LastFM-alike service which never quite managed to outstrip the Scrobbler, has capitulated and run to the arms of its rival. Toby Padilla has said goodbye:

Over the last couple of years things have begun to change. Musicmobs continued to grow to its current state thanks to all of our passionate users and the excellent help from Maribel, Chris and Jeff, but I knew this wasn't going to be enough. Many competitive services were launching and our own costs were starting to grow beyond our ability to support them.

I ended up spending less and less time developing the site and more time looking into ways we could survive and grow into a service everyone could use. This led to much soul searching about the direction Musicmobs should take and where I wanted to be in the future.

I explored MANY options. Some were to go it alone as a startup, others were to join a large company or larger startup and continue to innovate with a greater pool of resources.

Late last year I started talking to Last.fm to see if the most obvious fit was also the best. Those conversations ended up getting put on hold as they went through their sale to CBS. Shortly following the acquisition, Last.fm reached out to see if I was still interested in the possibility of joining them.

A couple of flights to London later, it was pretty obvious that we should be working together. Not only was their vision nearly identical to my own, but we all got along extremely well and I was thrilled to hear that they were big fans of Musicmobs!

Toby suggests the work he does with LastFM will be, actually, Musicmobs version 3; it does seem that both sides admiration for each others work is quite genuine and this isn't merely a 'buy the rivals, shut them down' move.