Imeem: No.3 Social Networking Site Leads In Streaming Music
By Anna Johnson on August 12th, 2008Imeem, apparently the third most popular social networking site in the United States after MySpace and Facebook, is also the most popular streaming music site.
Read Write Web reports that Imeem has licensing deals with the four major record labels (EMI, Universal, Sony and Warner Music), 80 percent of the independent record labels, and with Viacom to show videos from Comedy Central, MTV and VH1.
Imeem faces growing competition from CBS owned Last.fm and also from News Corp.’s MySpace, which will launch MySpace Music next month. Imeem had 27.7 million unique visitors in June and currently enlists around 65,000 new users each day. The company claims to have more than 85 million total unique users of its widgets. All very good… although MySpace has an estimated 120 million users.
Of course, the question for Imeem is… can it make money? It evidently commands a CPM (cost per thousand) of $4 per page, which may be insufficient to pay the record labels and still make money.
And the question for marketers intending to advertise on Imeem is… can it make THEM money? The search for ROI-positive advertising on social networks continues… Oops, I forget, it’s all about branding…
Incidentally, I created my Imeem page today: http://www.imeem.com/annaj… (I know, I know, it’s incomplete… but check out my playlist for what I listened to when writing today’s newsletter!)
Sources: Richard MacManus, “Imeem Taking Off – Before MySpace Music Has Even Launched”, Read Write Web, August 11, 2008, Anastasia Ustinova, “Music site Imeem dials up volume of traffic”, SFGate, August 11, 2008
September 10th, 2008 at 4:02 am
Yeah Imeem is quite fine! It’s part of the websites which contributed to the revolution in the musical world. However, my favourite one in that context is http://www.deezer.com/en which brought real free and legal music-on-demand! It’s quite great, and it has quite a huge catalogue right now! Check it out.