MySpace has acquire Imeem, the social music service, as it seeks to boost its music offerings
The deal, thought to be worth less than $1 million, will give MySpace access to Imeem’s 16 million users, as well as its suite of mobile applications and services. Owen Van Natta, chief executive of MySpace, said that key Imeem features would eventually be integrated in to his company’s own MySpace Music offering.
“MySpace Music and Imeem share a common vision and commitment to further enabling the socialisation of content across the web,” he wrote in a blog post. “This deal will allow us to leverage Imeem’s industry-leading technology and, over time, meaningfully integrate their products into the MySpace Music experience.”
Van Natta hailed Imeem for pioneering the ad-supported digital music model, and for being one of the first music-streaming services to allow users to embed music and video playlists on other sites, including MySpace.
“In the coming weeks, our team will be working to take the aspects of Imeem that users love and migrate them to MySpace Music,” he said. “We’ll start that transition today by redirecting Imeem users to MySpace Music to discover their favourite music. As quickly as possible, we’ll be working to offer users the Imeem playlists they’ve created on MySpace Music.”
Van Natta invited Imeem users to try out MySpace Music while the handover took place. Four senior Imeem executives, including the company’s chief executive and chief technical officer, will be moving to MySpace to facilitate the transition.
Van Natta, who joined MySpace from Facebook in April, is focused on revamping the site’s music offering. It also adds some missing pieces in the MySpace Music jigsaw, including an Imeem mobile application that allows users to stream music to the Apple iPhone and handsets running Google Android.
Rival services such as Spotify are leading the way for free online music-streaming services. Spotify charges users a premium of £9.99 per month to listen to songs on their phone, and to access tracks on their computer without adverts.
SOURCE: www.telegraph.co.uk
BACKGROUND
imeem was a social media service where users interacted with each other by streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos.
The company was founded in 2003 by Dalton Caldwell (ex-VA Linux) and Jan Jannink (formerly of Napster), and many of its core engineering team came from the original Napster file-sharing service. The company takes its name from “meme,” a term coined by author Richard Dawkins to describe the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.
imeem helped pioneer the free, advertising-supported music model for online music, permitting consumers to legally upload, stream and share music and music playlists for free with the costs supported by advertising. In 2007, imeem became the first-ever online music site to secure licenses from all 4 U.S. major music labels to offer their music catalogues for free streaming and sharing on the web.
The company also created the web’s first embeddable music and video playlists. People could use imeem’s widgets to embed songs and playlists from imeem virtually anywhere on the web, including on their MySpace and Facebook profiles or on their personal blogs.
imeem was based in San Francisco’s South of Market district, with additional offices in New York and Los Angeles. The company’s investors included Morgenthaler Ventures and Warner Music Group.
On December 8, 2009, it was bought out by MySpace Music, and all its content was removed.
> I AM NOT SURE HOW MANY OF YOU ARE FAMILIAR WITH IMEEM, BUT THIS SERIOUSLY BOTHERED ME. I WAS A USER OF IMEEM FOR SEVERAL YEARS IT HELPED INTODUCE ME TO A VARIETY OR ARTISTS AND GENRES OF MUSIC. SOME OF WHICH ARE RADIOHEAD, DEATHCAB FOR CUTIE, DECEMBERISTS, AND ALSO MADE ME A KERI HILSON FAN! ITS AUTO SUGGEST FEATURE WOULD INTODUCE YOU TO SIMILAR ARTISTS OR SONGS BASED ON YOUR SELECTIONS. I HOPE MY PLAYLIST OF OVER 500+ SONGS ARE RESTORED, IT HAS GOTTEN ME THROUGH MANY PROJECTS 🙁