Scrobble This: The Last.fm Story

In early-2000s London, a group of music-obsessed hackers stitched together two underground projects: Audioscrobbler, a data plugin built by Richard Jones that tracked your listening habits, and Last.fm, a streaming community crafted by Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel, and Michael Breidenbruecker. The merger in 2003 birthed something unique—a music platform that learned from you, recommended tracks before Spotify existed, and let you wear your taste like a badge.

The real magic? Scrobbling. Every play was logged. Charts weren’t curated—they emerged. It was social, obsessive, slightly nerdy, and totally addictive.

The first serious backer was Stefan Glänzer, a German angel with a nose for weird brilliance. He invested when others balked. He didn’t just write a cheque—he became chairman and champion. Soon, Joi Ito and Reid Hoffman joined the cap table, and by 2006, Index Ventures led a proper round. The dream felt real.

On May 30, 2007, CBS made it official: $280 million, all cash. The founders stayed. So did Glänzer. But inside the American media giant, momentum slowed. The team left. The brand faded. And yet, the scrobble endured.

Today, Last.fm is a quiet workhorse—a music memory machine still syncing play histories across the web. For Glänzer, the bet defined a golden run of early European tech investing. For the founders, it proved that building something beloved—something weird—could lead to one of the UK’s most iconic internet exits.