There's a rumour around that Viacom are looking to buy last.fm, and at this point it becomes important that last.fm/Audioscrobbler finally provides a dump of the collected data under a Creative Commons license, as they've failed to do for so long. Despite repeated requests for release of the data, and assurances that it would happen soon, the Audioscrobbler data page hasn't provided any downloads since Audioscrobbler merged with last.fm.
To quote from Wikipedia: "All Audioscrobbler plugins are open source, and the listening data it collects were historically released under a Creative Commons License. Recently, however, due to Last.fm's financial interest in the data, it seems unlikely that further releases of data will be made. Indeed, no data is currently available from Last.fm's website, and the last public data were dated May 6, 2005."
It's funny - I can justify asking for the data to be released, because I don't think it's the most financially valuable part of last.fm: even if all the data was lost, with the site and the user base I reckon it could get back to the same level of usefulness within a couple of months. On the other hand, if another company took over and spoiled or shut down the site it would be a shame to lose all that listening data.