Rumor Mill: Last.FM acquistion?
Thanks to Scott Engleman over at Yahoo Music for the tip that Viacom may be considering a $450 million acquisition of Last.Fm. Clearly the “old” media companies need to start acquiring in the space. However if Last.FM really does have 15 million registered users, this is $30/user. Seems pretty expensive considering that not all of those 15 million are active (I’ve heard numbers ranging from 1 million monthly visitors to 5 million users).
Sure Napster paid $43/subscriber for MusicNow’s subscribers, but those were active paying customers. I’m not sure what the right valuation for Last.Fm is, but $450 million seems unrealistically high. Of course if this is transaction is largely stock based, and Viacom believes it’s stock is currently greatly overvalued, it could be a very smart buy.
In any case, if this is true congratulations to the Last.FM crew.