The MySpace Music team is working around the clock to duplicate your imeem playlists and make them available to you on myspacemusic.com as soon as possible. In the coming weeks, we will be emailing you with instructions on how to claim your playlists on MySpace Music, using your MySpace login. If you don’t have a MySpace account you can sign up for one here.

If you have questions about MySpace, please visit http://faq.myspace.com/app/home.

(Via HypeBot)

Original Article: MySpace announced today that it has completed a deal to acquire "certain assets" of the popular social media music service imeem. imeem is now redirecting to MySpace Music.

"MySpace Music and imeem share a common vision and commitment to further enabling the socialization of content across the Web," says MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. "This deal will allow us to leverage imeem’s industry leading technology and over time, meaningfully integrate their products into the MySpace Music experience."

"Since its inception in 2003, imeem has built a highly engaged music community of more than 16 million users worldwide," says Van Natta. "imeem helped pioneer the ad-supported digital music model and created the Web’s first embeddable music and video playlists enabling users to embed songs and playlists virtually anywhere on the Web, including MySpace."

MySpace will be taking on imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, CTO Brian Berg, COO Ali Aydar and VP of Sales David Wade as consultants to help manage the transition. Financial terms were not made available in the announcement. Mike Arrington says it’s less than $1 million.

MySpace says that in the coming weeks, they will be working as quickly as possible to take aspects of imeem and migrate them to MySpace Music. The company says they’ll be working to offer users the imeem playlists they created.
 

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> MySpace Music Launches In The UK

> MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label

> MySpace Launches New Music Charts

Imeem was once a fairly successful organization.  In addition to sealing the music company deals, it’d earned the backing of Sequoia Capital (which funded Apple, Yahoo, Google, and YouTube over the years), and was attracting around 25 million visitors per month.

Unfortunately for Imeem, though, Peter Kafka wrote last night, "[MySpace] is paying a fire sale price of $1 million, sources familiar with the situation tell me, and could pay up to $7 million to $9 million in earnouts for key employees, who will likely include CEO Dalton Caldwell."

Otherwise, no one’s quite sure what will happen.  MySpace might keep Imeem open – the site’s built something of a name for itself – or just use Imeem’s assets to further its own music-related efforts.

We’ll keep an eye out for additional information and/or an official announcement, then, and in the meantime, Imeem fans might want to at least think through their options.

Related Articles:

> MySpace Launches New Music Charts

> Yahoo Challenges YouTube On Music Video Front

> Google Aims To Make Finding Music Easier

imeem Mobile has added a new feature called MyMusic, which allows users to access and stream their personal imeem library on their mobile device. Users can now listen to the music they own and have uploaded to imeem on their mobile device from anywhere.

The new version of imeem Mobile is available as a free download through the Android Market.

In addition to MyMusic, imeem has added a couple of other features including "favorite stations" that allows users to create two stations that they can customize based on their favorite artists or songs.

The other new feature is "share with a friend" that allows users to share songs with friends via email. The friend receives an email with a link to the song on imeem.

"Our community has been asking for this feature since we launched imeem Mobile last fall," said Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of imeem.

"We’re happy to give them what they want – access to their music from the cloud-and to help drive download sales by adding more value to the music people buy online.

Since launching in October, imeem Mobile has become the number one streaming music application in the Android Market and is one of the 15 most popular applications on the platform.
 

We’ll start with the layoffs, which have been confirmed.  Matt Graves, Imeem’s vice president of marketing, explained to Caroline McCarthy, "There’s not as much money floating around the market, and we had to cut our costs to accommodate."

He then noted that, more specifically, cuts were made in the "finance, marketing, communications, product, [and] technical operations" departments.  So it looks like the company is truly taking cover, and not just shedding fat.

As for the idea of new ownership, Rafat Ali reports, "Online music-focused social network Imeem is on the block, according to our sources, and has hired investment banker Montgomery and Co. to lead the sale."

A brief glimpse at the banking organization’s site confirms that this is its specialty; nine of the 18 press releases it’s put out this year follow the format of "Montgomery & Co. Advises ____ in its Acquisition."  Two more substitute the word "Sale" for "Acquisition."

Brace for some big changes, then, and at the rate Imeem’s moving, don’t be surprised if they occur in the near future.

Both are available for free through the Android Market.  Otherwise, as a MySpace spokesperson told WebProNews, "The MySpace app includes cool features like instant photo upload from Android to a MySpace profile and the ability to check out tour schedules on band profiles.  The MySpace app is also integrated with Shazam, allowing users to identify music and connect to the artist’s MySpace page."

 MySpace Mobile App Mockup

Fittingly enough, the Imeem app focuses on music, too.  It aims to bring streaming music and personalized radio to users’ phones, and syncs with profiles created on the main site.  On the more commercial front, it’s tied to the Amazon MP3 app so that users can buy songs if they wish.

These new applications are sure to become quite popular, probably the sort of things people will add in their first five minutes of T-Mobile G1 ownership.  Since MySpace had already developed an application for the iPhone and Pandora’s created an iPhone app, too, Android as a whole might even benefit from their existence.

As for the future, Imeem representatives have promised playlist integration, and the MySpace spokesperson mentioned innovation and monetization through advertising.

In essence: online music community, meet online music player.  There’s more to it than that, though, with Nick Gonzalez writing, "Anywhere.FM has the best upload and player interfaces I’ve seen, but lacked a solid monetization method."

Imeem should be able to help out on that front; although not wildly successful, it’s managed to offer users free music, make money from ads, and as mentioned a moment ago, generally stay on the good side of the industry’s most powerful corporations.

So now we just need to see how Imeem and Anywhere.FM work together.  In a statement, Dalton Caldwell, Imeem’s founder and CEO, said, "Anywhere.FM makes it simple for consumers to bring their music to the Web and discover new artists through recommendations and social connections.  That’s a great fit with what we do.  Combining Anywhere.FM’s expertise with the reach and scope of the imeem community creates some truly exciting possibilities, and we’re psyched they’re joining our team."

Fair enough.  And on a final side note: that may be the first time we’ve ever seen a founder and CEO use the word "psyched."

In a complaint filed in California District Court, Warners alleges "SeeqPod directly infringes Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, including by making on-demand and unauthorized digital public performances of those works. SeeqPod secondarily infringes Plaintiffs’ copyrights under the well-established doctrines of contributory, vicarious and inducement liability."

On SeeqPod’s Web site the company declares that it is protected from lawsuits under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because it operates as a search engine and does not host any material.

The Warner suit charges "SeeqPod searches for a particular type of content-music-that SeeqPod knows is overwhelmingly copyrighted. With simple clicks of a computer mouse, SeeqPod will play the work without authorization and will embed the link on social networking sites, like MySpace and Facebook, where the entire cycle of willful copyright infringement is repeated without end."

Last May Warner sued a similar company called Imeem that allowed users to create playlists from streamed music online. The two parties were able to come to an agreement and form a partnership.

An official statement explains, "VideoEgg‘s Eggnetwork Advertising Platform (EAP) . . .  now allows deployment of video advertising in any Flash environment.  With EAP for Video, high-quality publishers can easily integrate VideoEgg’s invitation-based video advertising into their existing video platform – enabling sites to earn revenue by delivering unique in-video ads to their community."

So Metacafe, Imeem, and Buzznet can accommodate a rush of new advertisers without reassigning (or hiring) an equal number of programmers.  And VideoEgg gains access to an estimated 50 million unique users.  Not bad, eh?

Of course, any financial details related to the deal remain undisclosed, so if one party or another is getting the short straw, we aren’t likely to hear about it.  This seems like the sort of thing companies would willingly pay to achieve, however, so the details might be of little relevance, anyway.

Finally, we’ll note that the last time we wrote about VideoEgg, it had just earned $15 million in funding; this isn’t a bad trend for any company.

Rather than make money on the music, they show ads and split ad revenues. This isn’t a new model, of course and I wonder what the artists make from it.

Universal is finding ways to get around Apple’s stronghold by not only working with imeem, but also with cell phone provider Nokia. There Comes With Music feature comes with a one-year, unlimited access music download service. Not only are the songs available on your cell phone but you can keep any music you downloaded after your subscription expires.

Why pay when you can get it free? TechCrunch says, if you include music from independent labels, imeem has 5 million songs. Compare that to iTunes’ 6 million. The site is said to have about 19 million users (make that one more – I just signed up). I noticed that imeem is integrated with Gmail, so you can download your contacts.

According to comscore, imeem.com was the fastest growing social media site from October 2006-2007 rising almost 1600%. Still it’s behind MySpace (which has limited content from Imeem from its site), or Facebook. Now that they’ve locked up the major record labels they should continue that trend.

In September imeem signed a deal with Sony/BMG music, then a month later EMI followed. Warner Music Group sued them earlier this year but in the end they signed on.
These are legal but if imeem catches illegal content on the site, they convert it to a 30 second sample (except the person who put the music on the site can listen to the entire song). They then direct you to affiliate links to purchase the track from Amazon.com or iTunes.

Need some new music on your playlist? Check out NPR’s music picks of the year. Or, if your Christmas music is getting stale, check out imeem’s playlists tagged Christmas.

Comments

As a spokesperson wrote in an email to WebProNews, “imeem is the first and only social networking service to secure licenses from all four major music companies (Warner Music Group, EMI Music, Sony BMG, and UMG) to give consumers free streaming access to their music and video.”

That means just about every artist you can think of (this latest deal adds names like Guns N’ Roses, Johnny Cash, and Queens of the Stone Age) can be heard at Imeem.com.  And to repeat a significant point: it’s all free.

That’s possible due to a revenue-sharing program.  The details of the program have not been made public, but it’s reasonable to assume that Imeem has been rather generous; just seven months ago, Imeem was actually being sued by Warner Music Group.  Coming such a long way in such a short time can’t be due to charisma alone.

Regardless, we’re pleased to hear about the UMG announcement, and believe it could cause Imeem’s current user counts (19 million unique visitors per month and 50,000 new registered users per day) to skyrocket.