Until another service comes along that allows users to record which songs they've listened to, and be as ubiquitous (there's a Last.fm plugin of some sort for practically <i>every</i> music software player, and even for some hardware players), I think Last.fm is safe.<p>With services such as Spotify competing with it, though, I think Last.fm has lost its chance in the music streaming industry. I have plenty of friends with Spotify accounts but very few with Last.fm accounts (and those that do have them solely as vestiges of the MySpace era).<p>As the article says, the problem is, as with so many of these small, new companies that get bought by much bigger ones (Flickr and Delicious come to mind as similar cases), they stagnated and have done nothing new.