iMesh

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

~ the eulogy ~

iMesh launched in November 1999 out of Israel as a Windows-only P2P client with a proprietary network called IM2Net. It was one of the first non-Napster P2P apps to gain real traction in the US market, and it stayed in the top tier of file-sharing software for a few years before Kazaa eclipsed everyone. The cultural footprint was thinner than Napster's or Kazaa's, because iMesh never had the news-cycle moment those two did. It was the third-most-installed P2P client for a stretch of 2001 to 2003 without ever being the conversation.

The legal pivot is what made iMesh interesting. The RIAA sued the company in 2003 and the case was settled in July 2004 for 4.1 million dollars plus a content-filtering obligation. Instead of disappearing, iMesh rebuilt itself as iMesh 6.0 in 2005, a paid music store with a licensed catalog of about 15 million songs and a P2P layer for sharing that ran the songs through acoustic fingerprinting. Tracks were 99 cents each or available by subscription. The model was unusual enough that the RIAA paraded iMesh as proof its lawsuits were creating legal alternatives.

iMesh was the kind of thing American college students were funneled into after they got Napster takedown letters from their universities. That demographic was not me. In Turkey the P2P-to-legal pipeline never happened, partly because no Turkish ISP was sending takedown letters in 2005 and partly because no Turkish bank let you charge 99 cents to a card. I used Kazaa Lite, then briefly WinMX, then BitTorrent. iMesh sat in the part of P2P history I read about rather than installed.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed in the US ~

By 2009 iMesh claimed roughly 16 million monthly users and was ranked the third-largest music subscription service in the US, behind iTunes and Rhapsody. Most of those users were on the free ad-supported tier, which was the carrot that kept iMesh useful for casual music listening even after iTunes had won the paid-download category. The product hung on through the early Spotify years because the catalog was deep and the interface was familiar to anyone who remembered Kazaa.

~ the breach ~

In September 2013 an attacker exfiltrated 51 million iMesh user accounts. The breach was not disclosed publicly until 2016, when the data appeared for sale on a darknet market for 167 dollars. By that point the breach was already three years old and most of the credentials had been reused everywhere. The iMesh response was the silent kind: no notification email, no password reset, no incident page. Two months later the website went dark.

~ what really happened ~

On June 9, 2016, the iMesh homepage was replaced with the text "We are sad to inform you that iMesh is no longer available." The support page added one sentence: "Due to changes in the music industry we regret to inform you that iMesh will no longer be available for download, and will no longer sell subscriptions or music tracks." The Facebook page got a brief post the same day. No final-balance refunds were promised. The settlement-era legal team had long since moved on. Spotify had passed 100 million users two months earlier.

~ the long tail ~

The iMesh exit is unusual for a P2P brand because the network kept running for a year or two before the brand was retired. Some users reported they could still see peers and complete transfers until late 2017 because the IM2Net trackers had been left up and forgotten. The deep cut for the file-sharing history shelves is that iMesh outlived almost every one of its 2001 competitors. The reward for going legal was twelve additional years and a quieter funeral.

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