CBS is paying 280 Million dollars for Last.fm. Last is claiming to revolutionize the music by mixing in the community rankings of its user base. Competing with sites like Pandora, iLike and others Last.fm is utilizing the benefits of the community to provide more precise song raitings and rankings along with additional user content. With 15 Million active members, CBS is paying approximately $18+ per user which looks like a decent deal if compared to Yahoo's $243 dollars per user for the Bebo deal.

"Last.fm is one of the most well-established, fastest-growing online community networks out there," said Leslie Moonves, President and Chief executive of CBS. "Last.fm adds a terrific interactive extension to all of our properties and also is a huge step in CBS Corporation's overall strategy of expanding our reach online to transition from a content company into an audience company."

Purchase like this, will certainly protect Last.fm from the Internet Radio Equality Act (IREA) by allowing it to tap into the bigger pockets of CBS.

Among the IREA changes are :

• Its basic royalty increases are 250% above the previous rates.

• It also requires a wholly new “per play” royalty calculation process and payment scale for stations that have significant online streaming listeners, an approach that is simply unworkable (as well as unaffordable) for public broadcasters.

Such increase in fees is bound to decrease Last.fm's competition by several fold, which may just be the event CBS is banking on right now.