Imeem

» see imeem.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Imeem was started in 2003 by Dalton Caldwell and Jan Jannink. Jannink was an engineer from the original Napster, and a sizable share of the imeem engineering team came from that same source. The first imeem product was a desktop client that combined messaging with file sharing. It did not catch on. In 2006 the company pivoted into a social-network shape with embeddable music and video, and the user numbers started climbing. By the end of 2006 imeem reported ten million monthly users. By March 2007 it was over sixteen million uniques.

The defining moment came in December 2007 when imeem signed licensing agreements with all four major labels. It was the first online service to do so. The model was simple: free streaming for the listener with ads on the page, and a revenue split with the labels. Playlists rendered as widgets that users embedded inside MySpace and Facebook profiles. For a stretch of 2008 imeem was the music layer of teen social media in the US, the place a profile got its current song from.

The math did not work. The label deals had revenue guarantees and minimum-payout clauses that kept rising while ad rates kept falling through the 2008 financial crisis. Imeem owed the labels more than it could earn. Through 2009 the company tried multiple rescues including paid tiers and sponsored content. None covered the gap. On December 8 2009 MySpace bought the assets for a reported sum under one million dollars and switched the service off the same afternoon. User playlists were redirected to MySpace Music, which itself faded over the next couple of years.

i did not use imeem. i was on ttnet broadband at university by 2006, but my listening habit then was winamp with last.fm scrobbling, not a US-centric web player wrapped around myspace embeds. myspace itself was thinner in turkey than the AOL/MTV ecosystems it grew out of, so the imeem widgets that were everywhere on american profiles were rare on the profiles i actually saw. i ran into imeem mostly as a name in tech-press headlines about label deals and then as a shutdown post in december 2009.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the embed era ~

The imeem widget was a small piece of late-2000s social design that does not exist anymore. You picked a song or built a playlist, then pasted the embed HTML into your MySpace profile. Anyone visiting your profile heard your selection. The widget was the soundtrack of the page in a literal sense. This pattern survived for a couple of years on Tumblr too, then died as platforms locked down embedded media for performance and licensing reasons. Spotify embeds today are the descendant, but they have nowhere near the volume of personal-profile music sharing that imeem widgets had at peak.

~ the all-four-labels deal ~

The December 2007 licensing announcement was a real milestone. Until then, every legal music service had at least one major holdout, which meant catalog gaps a user noticed inside fifteen minutes. Imeem was the first product where any artist on any major was streamable without the user thinking about it. The catch was the deal terms. Each label took an upfront payment plus a per-stream guarantee. The guarantees were calibrated for ad revenue projections that turned out to be wildly optimistic by 2009. The deal that made imeem culturally important was the same deal that made it financially impossible.

~ what myspace did ~

MySpace was already past peak by December 2009 and was buying complementary properties trying to stay relevant in music. The imeem deal was less than a million dollars in cash with the existing label relationships rolled into MySpace Music. MySpace did not preserve user data in any meaningful way. Playlists evaporated. Embedded widgets across the web turned into broken players within weeks. Two years later MySpace was sold to Specific Media for thirty-five million dollars, and the music layer that imeem had been was no longer a working part of the product.

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