Members blue2blue Posted December 11, 2007 Members Share Posted December 11, 2007 It's a social networking site. No, it's a free music streaming/"sharing" site. But, it's a big label sanctioned site... It's... hard to pin it down, exactly, and I'm still trying to figure out what it's all about. But it will certainly have an impact, I think: www.imeem.com Imeem nabs Universal support Faced with lawsuits and threats of legal action earlier this year, imeem has now stemmed the tide and inked deals with all four major labels to stream their entire digital music and video catalog for free. The last agreement was announced today, with imeem agreeing to terms with Universal Music group, the world largest record company and home to a catalog that includes, 50 Cent, U2, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Amy Winehouse, and Maroon 5. The deal, a new model for the music industry, calls for imeem to share advertising revenue with Universal in exchange for access to the label giant's full catalog. Imeem, which claims 19 million unique visitors each month and 50,000 new registered users each day, allows users to upload their favorite music, videos, and photos, search for and stream videos, find new content through social discovery, and create custom playlists to share with friends on and off the site. "imeem has developed an innovative way to make our artists' music a central part of the social networking experience," Doug Morris, chairman and CEO of UMG, said in a statement. "More importantly, they've done so the right way--by working with UMG to provide an exciting musical experience for consumers, while ensuring that our artists are fairly compensated for the use of their works." continued at Mp3.com Now... I do not think I'm going to be doing much listening there -- I'm personally pretty delighted by my new music streaming subscription (Yahoo Music) and my selection is a lot broader than what I found on imeem as well as organized into albums instead of a big jumble like imeem. Also, the media quality at imeem is ALL over the map. I heard a pretty high quality Coltrane file from the Ole album but also heard some decidedly double digit bitrates of other music -- definitely pretty lo fi. It started dawning on me that these apparently were ripped and uploaded by members not labels -- hence the wide variety of quality. I guess. But the appeal of imeem is supposedly public playlists (at least as far as I can figure)... that seems to be a number one avenue of social interaction. I guess. But assembling a playlist looks to be a crapshoot, since you have to pick around looking for songs you might want and then the quality might not be very high... (I'm still quite hazy on uploading privileges -- the TOS say you have to have rights/permission to whatever you upload. Perhaps the deals with the majors in the article above cover that, I don't know.) I went to their "community" but the BB there seems to be devoted to serious issues like the etiquette or oral sex in dating and the like. Not very informative. (Well, I mean about the website. ) Still, with Facebook going through serious technical backlash issues (turns out their privacy policies left quite a bit to be desired and that they had barely thought through the consequences of some of their unannounce policies) and MySpace continuing to be a snakepit of malware/security issues, it may be just the opening imeem needs... We'll see, I guess. _______________ Here's an interesting take on the social networking site phenom, concluding each new site will inevitably be poisoned by its own success: http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573&pgno=1&queryText= Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Cry Logic Posted December 12, 2007 Members Share Posted December 12, 2007 Looks good but the songs don't play in FireFoxwhen I select them and click the play button. StatusBar shows "Waiting for Imeem.com" but nothing ever happens.... I have "about:blank" disabled globally in NoScript.I also have adblock running......Could they be "interfering" with Imeem's Flash based player? Is it s'posed to work outside the USA? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted December 12, 2007 Author Members Share Posted December 12, 2007 Yeah, you have to have javascript enabled to see the Flash based player. Don't know if the adblock would be an issue or not. Don't know about that outside-the-USA issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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