 | |
Type of site | Viral content sharing, social network service |
|---|---|
| Owner | News Corp. |
| Created by | Community |
| Commercial | Mixed |
| Registration | free, required to play many full-length songs |
| Launched | 2003 |
| Current status | Defunct |
The online service imeem was a social media website where users interacted with each other by streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos. It operated from 2003 until 2009 when it was shut down after being acquired by MySpace.
The company was founded in 2003 by Dalton Caldwell (formerly of VA Linux) and Jan Jannink (formerly of Napster), and many of its core engineering team came from the original Napster file-sharing service.[1] The company takes its name from "meme", a term coined by biologist Richard Dawkins to describe the ideas and cultural phenomena that spread as if they had a life of their own.
Helping to pioneer the free, advertising-supported model for online music, imeem permitted consumers to legally upload, stream and share music and music playlists for free with the costs supported by advertising. In 2007, imeem became the first-ever online music site to secure licenses from all four U.S. major music labels to offer their music catalogs for free streaming and sharing on the web.[2]
The company also created the web's first embeddable music and video playlists. People could use imeem's widgets to embed songs and playlists from imeem virtually anywhere on the web, including on their MySpace and Facebook profiles or on their personal blogs.
Headquartered in San Francisco's South of Market district (SoMa), imeem had additional offices in New York City and Los Angeles. The company's investors included Morgenthaler Ventures and Warner Music Group.
On December 8, 2009, imeem was bought out by MySpace Music in a firesale for an undisclosed amount. However, it is stated to have been less than US$1 million.[3]
- ^ "'Jan Jannink, Co-Founder' thread in imeem forum". Groups.imeem.com. Retrieved 2011-02-20.
- ^ Erick Schonfeld Dec 9, 2007 (2007-12-09). "Imeem Pens a Deal with Universal Music. Now Has All the Majors". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved 2011-02-20.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ MySpace buys imeem music site for under $1 mln Archived December 12, 2009, at the Wayback Machine