Ad-supported music just won another convert. Music-sharing social network imeem struck a deal with EMI Music so that starting today its members can legally stream songs from Radiohead, Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Interpol, Daft Punk, the Beastie Boys, and every other EMI artist. EMI joins Warner Music and Sony-BMG as the third major label to strike a deal with imeem. That only leaves Universal Music Group among the majors to sign a deal.
After hitting a few bumps in the road, imeem seems to be hitting its stride. Comscore shows it as one of the fastest growing social sites, with 3.2 unique U.S. visitors in September—although that’s down from a peak earlier in the year. (The company claims 18 million unique visitors worldwide).
Imeem is that rare Web music sharing site that has convinced the labels to play ball by splitting its ad revenues with them every time someone listens to one of their songs. Right now, imeem only has display ads, but it will soon offer in-stream audio ads and video overlays as well. Members can upload their own MP3s to imeem and create a playlist that anyone else can stream. The company relies on Snocap’s audio fingerprinting technology to determine how to split up the proceeds.
The problem there is that Snocap (founded by Napster’s Sean Fanning) recently cut its staff and may shut down. The best hope for imeem is that Snocap finds a buyer (trust me, it’s looking) who will keep its service going and honor its contracts. Otherwise, Caldwell will be singing the blues.
LOL, horrible post
Techcrunch for the deadpool!!
Steve, Dalton,
This is exciting stuff. Congrats.
Adriana
Gonna buy Imeem!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
The joy of not having a viable business model before starting up.
Quote:
“Comscore shows it as one of the fastest growing social sites, with 3.2 unique U.S. visitors in September.”
3.2 doesn’t sound like that many to me…
When you have run a business for years that required numerous physical distribution outlets, you get it into your mind that you need the same thing in the digital world.
Why the labels are not building social networks on their own is amazing to me? Imeem’s valuation will continue to grow off the backs of content owned by labels (now I sound like MySpace) because the people running labels fail to realize that digital music acquisition is realized with a mouse and not by driving a Hummer to Best Buy.. Check my Elephant Piss rant on Unsprung for elaboration.
Why does Imeem need SnoCap? MusicIP should be able to provide the same fingerprinting service?
Congrats anyways to Imeem, somebody gets it!
whilst I am impressed by the way imeem are goign (although I only came across them the other day), their last blog posting relating to Sony-BMG only related to full streaming for the US….so where does the new deal cover??
The reason imeem uses snocap instead of musicip or audible magic is because snocap has the ability to resolve an accoustic fingerprint to sound recording ownership information in its database. Musicip and other fingerprinting systems don’t necessarily have the ownership information, and some can only determine whether a fingerprint is in a collection determined to be “copyrighted”. If you need to have various opt-in information set at the track level (as is the case with imeem), you need more than that.
Plaxico has a very good reply