Last week at Y Combinator’s Startup School nearly a dozen of the Valley’s most seasoned entrepreneurs and investors came together to give advice to hundreds of people looking to launch or get involved with a startup. One of the standout talks came from Dalton Caldwell, the founder of defunct music startup imeem who is now running his second company, picplz. If you’ve ever considered launching a… → Read More
Over the weekend at the MidemNet music event in Cannes, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta took the stage to talk about the current status of the struggling company. During his keynote interview with Billboard editorial director Bill Werde, Van Natta stated that MySpace was showing an increase in unique visitors for the first time since the middle of last year. In fact, Van Natta said that according to… → Read More
Last month, MySpace finally completed its deal to acquire troubled music startup Imeem. Unfortunately for imeem fans, the bank shut the service down as soon as the deal was completed, redirecting them to a MySpace Music splash screen. MySpace was subsequently trashed by outraged users who wanted their playlists back. Today, they’re getting what they asked for: MySpace has just sent out an Email… → Read More
Vienna, Austria-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so.
The launch has been a long time coming, considering the fact that the startup has already produced a fully functional web client, and Adobe-AIR powered desktop client and applications for iPhone, Facebook and Boxee since its … → Read More
In the two weeks since it acquired imeem in a firesale, MySpace has been met with waves of frustration from outraged users who blame the company for shutting down the troubled music service. MySpace didn’t really have anything to do with imeem’s sudden shutdown (it would have closed shop anyway), but most users don’t care — they just want their imeem playlists and free streaming music back. … → Read More
Online music services have had a bad few weeks. Imeem got bought by MySpace for next to nothing, Lala got bought by Apple for something ranging from a little to not-very-much. Spotify continues to be a no-show in the U.S. But at least one service, Pandora, appears to be doing quite well for itself.
The service has announced that it surpassed 40 million registered users earlier this month. That… → Read More
It’s been nearly a week since MySpace Music closed its acquisition of some of the assets of music service Imeem and redirected imeem.com to music.myspace.com. MySpace took a lot of heat for the sudden shutdown of the Imeem service, particularly the API.
But the fact is that MySpace didn’t shut the Imeem service down. Imeem’s creditors and the music labels did. If MySpace hadn’t done the deal… → Read More
It’s only been a few hours since MySpace finally completed and acknowledged its acquisition of imeem. MySpace has now shuttered the streaming music service, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But in its haste, MySpace has also pulled the rug out from under any developers tapping into the imeem API, without bothering to give them any warning at all.
One of the biggest apps affected is … → Read More
MySpace Music has completed its acquisition of most of the assets of music service iMeem.
We first broke the news that MySpace was close to acquiring iMeem last month. Two days later, we reported that an agreement was signed to purchase the assets of the company for $1 million in cash.
The deal didn’t close, however, because some of the assets MySpace Music was going to buy (namely, servers)… → Read More
Last month we broke the news that MySpace was acquiring music service iMeem, and that an agreement had been signed between the two companies.
All of that was accurate, including the $1 million fire sale price. But despite reports to the contrary, while the deal was signed it never closed (which explains why MySpace hasn’t announced it).
Sometime between signing and closing some problems came up… → Read More
Sometimes you have to apply the smell test to what your sources are telling you, and the rumors we’re hearing about Apple’s purchase of music service LaLa are definitely smelling a little off. $80 million for LaLa? That isn’t what we’re hearing.
LaLa was purchased for $17 million by Apple, according to our sources with indirect knowledge of the deal. And the company supposedly had $14 million in… → Read More
On Monday we broke the news that MySpace was in late stage negotiations to acquire music service iMeem. Those negotiations are now concluded, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and an agreement has been signed. MySpace will acquire most of the assets of iMeem for a purchase price of around $1 million in cash.
$1 million isn’t the “real” purchase price for the company. Some assets are being left… → Read More
MySpace is in late stage negotiations to acquire music streaming service iMeem, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. MySpace is on a bit of an acquisition spree – they acquired iLike, another music service, three months ago.
The iMeem acquisition isn’t yet finalized, we’ve heard from sources, and awaits approval from various stakeholders.
We don’t know the price of the acquisition, but this… → Read More
I’m here at Capitol Records in Hollywood, California for a special media event where Lala, MySpace, iLike, Google and others are officially announcing the launch of Google’s Music Onebox — a special new kind of Google search result that will let you instantly stream songs directly from Google’s results page. We first broke the news of the feature’s impending launch last week, though none of the… → Read More
I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of… → Read More
iMeem may go down in the history books as the little company that could. The service morphed from an instant-messaging centric social network into a widget service to a full on music streaming service (read an early post by us on iMeem here). Over the years they’ve been close to shutting down more than once. And yet, they’re still here, and still fighting.
In May news broke that iMeem may have… → Read More
I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do). Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most from this… → Read More
Does embattled music streaming site imeem think it can take on iTunes? For the most part, nearly every streaming song on the site has a download button which links to both iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. But it is quietly testing its own music download store which bypasses iTunes and Amazon and sells MP3s directly. For instance, this is the case with some Sub Pop artists, such as Iron and… → Read More
Imeem has a great Android app. In fact, it’s still one of the few very good apps available on that platform as it continues to find its legs. It’s so good that we gave it a Crunchie this year. But as good as it is, it took the application coming to the iPhone platform to push the company past a big milestone: 1 million mobile platform installs.
Imeem Mobile for the iPhone, which we were the first… → Read More
In an honest blog post, music recommendation and streaming service Blip.fm (which we likened to a Twitter for music when it launched almost exactly one year ago), CEO Jeff Yasuda has indicated that the startup is going through a rough phase right now that has forced it to make some fairly painful changes to their service.
The blog post, titled ‘Navigating the storm’, speaks volumes about Yasuda’s… → Read More
Easily my favorite app on the Android platform is Imeem. It’s simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to listen to a huge range of music for free. And now it’s coming to the iPhone, we’ve learned.
The Imeem app has already been submitted for App Store approval and could be released any day, we’re hearing from a reliable source. In terms of what it will offer, you can probably expect it to be… → Read More
How bad are things getting for music streaming startups? We knew that imeem was on the verge of shutting down before getting a last-minute cash infusion from some of its investors, but an SEC filing from Warner Music adds some more details about exactly how dire imeem’s situation is, as well as that of another music startup, Lala.
Warner Music Group, an investor in both imeem and Lala, thinks… → Read More
Insert your favorite cliche or idiom here: Imeem may have dodged a bullet. Or has risen from the ashes. They have nine lives. Or my favorite: they may have pulled a rabbit out of the deadpool.
The point is, they aren’t going to be closing down any time soon, say sources close to the company. And for a free music streaming company, that’s really saying something.
Weeks ago they were on the ropes… → Read More
One of the reasons that Internet music streaming services Pandora, imeem and Last.fm have been able to build large audiences is because they are run by people who have a passion for music. Or should I say, a passion for music beyond pop music. With Goom Radio, I’m not so sure.
Not only is Goom clearly trying to play the popular music card with a website littered with the likes of Coldplay, Kanye… → Read More
I’ve been tracking the progress of Vienna, Austria-based music startup tunesBag for a while now. It’s essentially a social music player that can best be compared to the likes of Lala, imeem and Anywhere.fm in the sense that it allows you to upload your entire MP3 collection, stream it from anywhere over the Internet and share it with your friends. It’s completely free and claims to be perfectly… → Read More
Imeem, the free streaming music site backed by Sequoia Capital, Warner Music and other prominent investors, is rumored to be in serious trouble.
Music insiders are saying a shutdown of the company is imminent after a failed attempt to sell the company or raise more cash. A spokesperson flatly denied the shutdown rumors today, but confirmed that the company layed off staff last week (six people… → Read More
There’s something wrong with CBS Radio’s press release announcing the launch, complete with silly “countdown,” of 92.3 Now FM in New York City, a contemporary hit radio station that will replace K-Rock on Wednesday, March 11, at 5:00pm. (Contemporary hit radio, in plain English, means garbage pop songs, distinguished by their use of auto-tune and use of lowest-common-denominator song-writing.)… → Read More
Music recommendation engine / social network Last.fm has launched an official, feature-rich application for the Android platform that enables users to stream radio stations (including personalized streaming radio), consult up-to-date concert information and also offers the ability to track users’ listening habits based on their Last.fm profile.
The company says the application should be available… → Read More
MOG demo’d the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far.
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today… → Read More
What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). … → Read More
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