San Francisco — MySpace Music, a joint venture between MySpace and the major labels, on Tuesday announced that it has agreed to acquire “certain assets” of the cash-crunched popular social networking site Imeem and is weaving it into the social networking community to capitalize on the biggest one: users. imeem is now redirecting to MySpace Music.
According to reports from various sources that said the deal was completed over the weekend, but MySpace Music CEO Owen Van Natta announced that the two companies only finalized the deal today.
“MySpace Music and imeem share a common vision and dedication to further enabling the socialization of content across the Web,” says Van Natta. “This deal will allow us to leverage imeem’s industry leading technology and over time, meaningfully integrate their products into the MySpace Music experience.”
According to Van Natta, MySpace Music plans to “leverage imeem’s industry leading technology” to begin with, and “in due course, meaningfully integrate their products into the MySpace Music experience.”
Within minutes of MySpace Music’s announcement, imeem.com failed to load. From now onwards, imeem’s 16 million-plus users will be redirected to MySpace Music.
The imeem.com domain now redirects to MySpace Music, while links to some personal songs collection on imeem now redirect to their corresponding pages on MySpace’s recently-acquired iLike site (where, ironically, some of the songs come from MySpace competitor YouTube). Embedded imeem songs and playlists, including hundreds that has been stored on Wired.com, no longer load at all.
Imeem introduced in San Francisco in 2003 and rose to popularity online community for streaming and distributing music free of charge. Imeem uses an ad-supported model that enabled users to listen to Internet radio or embed songs at websites.
MySpace Music delivers unlimited, free streaming of music, allowing users to personalize and distribute playlists at the online social-networking service. MySpace Music is available in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
California-based MySpace Music claims the most comprehensive catalog of audio tracks and music videos available online. Along with free music delivery options, the service empowers users to buy songs as digital downloads from Apple’s online iTunes store.
“In the coming weeks, our team will be working to take the aspects of imeem that users love and migrate them to MySpace Music,” Van Natta said.
Imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, CTO Bryan Berg, COO Ali Aydar and VP of Sales David Wade have signed on to MySpace Music as consultants to “help manage this transition,” including porting imeem playlists over to MySpace Music, which has its own licensing agreements.
Since being knocked out by Facebook as the world’s most favorite online social networking community, News Corp.-owned MySpace has transformed into an Internet venue where musicians famous or obscure can connect with music lovers.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.