We had to get more funding this year somehow. It was a case of either taking in more VC funding, losing control of the company and bringing in new management, or going for this deal, which keeps the existing management.

I guess most users would be happier if last.fm *was* still run by 10 of us living in tents on the roof. But that’s not a sensible way to make money.

It doesn’t make the threats empty, if everyone who chimed in that they were bailing really did leave, it still wouldn’t be enough to account for the difference. A few people can make a lot of noise.

Still I’d be concerned about more creeping pervasive effects. It’s one thing to have the loyalty of people who are true to what they perceive as a small group of nice guys providing them a free service, and another to keep that good will when you can be interpreted as “tools of an evil media empire” (see verbal’s comment above).

I’d expect it to take a little more user-loving than it has in the past to keep the You Rule vibe that’s characterized your users’ attitude toward you so far. On the other hand, maybe such a nice big cash infusion will help to provide the (wo)man power to have more communication with users. The blog is a good start, but only a start.

Here’s an interesting datapoint for you. We’ve had around 430 user accounts deleted in the last 24 hours, compared to 250 or so in the previous 24 hours. So most of these threats seem to be empty, at least. It’ll take a while before we can see what effect it has on subscriptions.

(amusingly, the anti-spam word on this post was “rabid”)