Last.fm went down this morning after I managed to scrobble a few tracks on Pandora. I figured it would be down for a few minutes like it does on occasion, and my music would scrobble as usual. It did not. I waited a few hours. Still not scrobbling. As of around 12:20am Eastern Time the Last.fm status page says that scrobbles are still down, meaning that today will be almost a scrobble-free day. Rhythmbox queues my played tracks, but today would be the day I decided to play with Spotify and a bunch of new artists all day. A lot of them were good, too.
But why am I complaining about the outage of a service that I don’t happen to pay for? (Incidentally, if I did pay for a music service, it would probably be Last.fm since I already use it so much, but that gets its own post.) This seems to be the reaction of many people when a popular site goes down, and yes, I am sometimes one of them. Twitter and Reddit, I’m looking at you. Has the Internet created a sense of e-entitlement? We think we deserve these free services because they’re there, and when they go down, we don’t think about what could have made the site go down but think of what we wanted or needed to do there instead.
Just some food for thought.