iMeem: sinking fast
p2pnet news view Advertising | Music:- The likes of Google and Yahoo have been getting away with advertising murder for years, falsely representing to their clients that surfers pay attention to adverts.
The only way they can get people to look at their ads is by trickery, and even then, eye-balls on doesn’t by any mean product bought. Not even nearly.
Now iMeem, owner of Snocap, another failed effort to cash in on the online music scene, looks like it, too, is sinking.
Says Hypebot:
“Ad revenue simply wasn’t meeting the projections needed to pay labels the per stream rates agreed to. It was said that imeem was burning through the cash that Sequoia and Warner Music had given them at a rapid rate. Then the company began openly searching for a buyer. Along the way, the global economic meltdown hit, further slowing both the flow of online ad dollars and capital investments.
“Now comes word from a variety of sources that imeem is in real trouble. Not the $30 million behind in payments to labels that one source told TechCrunch, but enough trouble that the future of the service that delivers in excess of 1 billion song plays each month is in serious doubt. In addition to dwindling cash reserves, a tough ad market and with few investors in sight, imeem faces both a major label community that appears unwilling to re-negotiate terms and the potential of competition from Spotify, Project Playlist and others.”
No need to stay tuned.
by trickery – Turn it off, TurnItUp, March 23, 2009
another failed effort - Imeem — Snocap’s new owner, February 14, 2008
Hypebot – Are The Major Labels Killing Imeem?, March 26, 2009
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March 26th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Suppose they remove all “korporate formulaic product” from their site so that they don’t have to pay the Big Four Kartel.
But after that they will have yet another competitor: Jamendo with its Creative Commons licensed music.
March 26th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
“Ad revenue simply wasn’t meeting the projections needed to pay labels the per stream rates agreed to.”
Another example of how the labels could cooperate, but choose not to, for innovation’s sake.
How many of these type of efforts have we seen come and go in a very short while, failing mostly due to the inflexibility of the labels’ demands for ad revenue cuts?
If they had any intention to see any of these sites work, the labels could agree to expect cuts only where actual click-throughs occur, instead of all the “flat rates” they’ve been insisting on.
March 26th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
The best thing that could happen would be for drastically-reduced copyright terms (say, ten years at maximum, NO renewals of any kind, mandatory registration like I’ve been advocating here for awhile.)
With a revitalized public domain, sites like this (and p2p networks, and music blogs, and remix artists, etc. etc. etc.), would have a much larger pool of stuff to work with. Somebody over on Ezee.se (wink) said that he didn’t like the RIAA either because they “extorted” him for the use of “their” music in his shows. With a revitalized public domain, the insane gouging and money-grabs wouldn’t harm more than the last ten years of culture at any given time. This would provide an “economic incentive” for the labels to put out product WORTHY to enter the public domain (instead of trying to bullshit us all with stuff like Milii Vanilli, for example.)
But none of these sites will EVER works until the existing IP regime is either drastically reformed, or killed off outright.
Handy rule of thumb: Imeem, Spiralfrog, the “new” Napster and Mp3.com, are the online equivalent of Milli Vanilli — fake, cheesy, talentless, ill-concieved Korporate knockoffs. They can’t hoodwink everybody.
March 26th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
I disagree with you about imeem being a corporate knockoff comparable to the “new” Napster. Some of the engineers that were at the original napster are the developers of imeem. they basicly threw napster into a browser, letting users upload any tune they wanted so they could share it. Just like youtube later did with video.
Anyhow… imeem is overflowing with music that has nothing to do with the big labels, but those big labels get front page features, no coubt because it’s part of the deals they negotiated with big music to avoid the whole ‘getting sued out of business’ problem.
If you’re an indie artist you can upload your music to imeem and take home a cut of the advertising your work generates, that sounds pretty good when you realise that myspace and youtube give you nothing at all in return.
March 27th, 2009 at 12:57 am
Napfan:
So the developers were involved with the original mp3.com?
Honestly, I dunno what you’re going for here: Shawn Fanning — the guy who originally CREATED Napster in the first place — was one of the guys behind Snocap, so what’s your point?
Yeah, Imeem may be “overflowing” with indie music, but so are a lot of other sites that don’t relentlessly “feature” Korporate product at the top constantly. I dunno about anybody else, but personally, when sites cut the type of “deals” the RIAA seems to require, they end up as lobotomized crap afterward — which is part of what makes TPB so cool: they have absolutely no interest whatsoever in “making nice” with the RIAA thugs.
Myspace is “overflowing” with indie music, too. So is Soundclick. So is Jamendo.
My point still stands: whenever the RIAA creates something, it’s lobotomized crap from the get-go (like Spiralfrog), and whenever the companies “cut deals” with the RIAA corporate demons, they END UP being turned into Korporate junk.
That’s part of why the RIAA needs to be neutralized: so that really innovative stuff can happen without fear of being lobotomized.
Napfan? Fan of Original Napster, or current? (Just curious.)
March 27th, 2009 at 1:02 am
Almost forgot: sometimes they DON’T end up as lobotomize crap:
Some (Kazaa?) end up as predatory, malware/spyware/RIAA-entrapmentware bullshit.
August 8th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
That is like with a lot of Companies i would say, they not listening to the member etc. so what you think
that will be an other site what will shut down soon that will be the result of not listening and not knowing
what they are doing !!!
One thing i have to say in the start imeem was really good better than any other site.