According to the spotify blog the U2 album will be on there from Sunday, in advance of the release date. The app also allows scrobbling to Last.fm. As far as I can tell this is all entirely legal, so why are the RIAA so incensed?

"El Reg is also awaiting the official word from the RIAA"

Ars Technica reported that the RIAA have said that they didn't even send this request: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/02/riaa-denies-rumors-that-lastfm-turned-over-data.ars

Whenever I hear about TechCrunch, I'm instantly reminded of Ted Dziuba's brilliant description of them as "the Special Olympics of tech media".

Last.fm is a great service, and has worked hard to earn a name for itself since the Audioscrobbler days. It's a real shame to think users have abandoned it for no reason, all because some dickwad "journalist" (I mean, FAIList) would rather cash in a lunch ticket at someone else's expense, rather than be arsed to do his research. What a complete cod.

shurely shome mishtake?

WTF kind of made-up non word is that?

It does kind of create a mental image of someone rummaging around in the proverbial, up to their elbows in it, looking for "owt for nowt".

Probably quite appropriate.

"why are the RIAA so incensed?"

Um ... they're not. Someone made the whole thing up.

That's the point.

Hey thanks for the headsup - downloading via Torrent as we speak.

It's the term last.fm use for keeping track of what songs you play ...

It is indeed made up, all words at some point are made up ...

Or would you rather "people send tag data to their user account for a song to last.fm" instead of "people scrobbled a song on last.fm"?

two years for this to happen! It was going to eventually wasn't it! I was thinking this only yesterday.

I get a lot of Promo's through the post for reviewing in magazines and blogs and it only occurred to me recently that I should probably disable lasty scrobbler when listening to these records over and over again to write a review.

I guess a possible solution would be for A&R / Labels / PR to send out these CD's with additional meta data on the files.

And when does it count as 'not officially released'? What about the millions of people worldwide who buy and sell imports? It is perfectly legal to own a Japanese Re-issue of album A or even a standard issue of album A which is not due for general release in country B for some time.

Will be a tough cookie to crack me thinks but I am all ears to the options.