Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

Amazon just purchased Shelfari - a social website for book lovers (it's like Last.fm for books). This makes sense since Amazon has had a hard time getting their users to contribute social data beyond book reviews - data like social tags, as well as taste data associated with book lovers. Personally, I think Amazon made the wrong choice - I like LibraryThing much better - (even if its just because of the Shelfari astroturfing incident).

Now imagine if Amazon wanted to improve its AmazonMp3.com music store with gobs of social data about music - clearly the thing to do would be to buy the company that already has all of the data - that would be Last.fm. Unfortunately for Amazon, Last.fm is now owned by CBS and probably won't be selling it soon.