MySpace Buys Imeem, Artists Screwed Mon, Dec 14, 2009 • 06:14 AM CST - Byraf
MySpace completed its purchase of ailing song streaming site Imeem this past week, scooping up its 16 million users and mobile phone applications for less than $1 million. Without warning, MySpace quickly shuttered the service and disabled many third-party mash-up applications, including twt.fm, a popular service that combines Imeem and Twitter.
MySpace is taking a lot of heat from users and the press for "destroying" the popular service, but if MySpace hadn’t done the deal Imeem would have shut down anyway. The company was just out of cash and options.
Users of the service are not happy, but there's another group that is even more frustrated. WIRED reports that independent artists who sold their music through imeem's Snocap music storefronts won't be paid what's owed even after MySpace Music's acquisition of some -- but not all -- of Imeem. MySpace Music bought "certain assets" from imeem, and they do not include imeem's liability to more than 110,000 independent artists with Snocap storefronts, according to a source with inside knowledge of the deal. Artists attempting to get paid for songs sold must get in line with Imeem's bank and other creditors.
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Mon, Dec 14, 2009 @
09:10 AM CST
Anything from thier business model that we can learn here? My greatest concern for the advancement of more creative collaboration generated content development is that folks facilitating the distribution and developer(s) payment system (licensing, legal, collaborator distribution fairness) and so forth) won't accept early the need for an effective monitization strategy.
What didn't they do that they should have? And what didn't happen that they expected would?
