| Status | Privately Held |
| Website | www.imeem.com |
| Blog | imeemblog.imeem.com |
| Category | Web |
| Address |
660 4th St., Box 155 San Francisco, CA, 94107 USA |
| Snocap, 2/08 1 | N/A |
| Anywhere.FM, 1/08 2 | N/A |
| Total | $750k |
| Seed, 10/06 3 First Round Capital Mark Goines Ron Conway Geoff Ralston Sy Fahimi Jeff Clavier | $750k |
| Series A, 9/04 4 Sequoia Capital Morgenthaler Ventures | |
| Series B, 4/08 5 Sequoia Capital |
Imeem is a social media network where users can create, recommend and discover music, film/video, art, and pop culture media and connect with other users who have similar tastes.
After originally pushing an instant-messaging centric model, Imeem decided to start offering custom music playlists, video channels, photo slideshows and blogs, which could all be easily shared through the web. These offerings helped the company gain a fair amount of traction despite being blocked by MySpace. The MySpace blockage wasn’t the only bad news Imeem got – they were also sued by Warner Music for copyright infringement. However, it didn’t take long for the Sequoia-backed company to bounce back. They quickly legitimized their service by signing an agreement with Snocap.
Today artists are paid in proportion to the popularity of their music on Imeem. The company also partnered with three major record labels (Song BMG, EMI Music and Warner Music Group) as well as hundreds of indie labels. This has allowed Imeem to offer free (Imeem’s partners take a cut of the ad revenue) on-demand streaming of music and video content. This model seems to be working quite well for the company, as they are currently (as of 11/07) attracting over 18 million unique users each month.
Imeem takes its name from “meme” - a term coined to describe the ideas that communities, adopt, and express.
| Website | www.imeem.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Tags | music, video, blogs, music-promotion |
Once you get past the ever annoying, but growingly popular “invite your friends” page that’s thrown in your face during registration, it’s relatively smooth sailing. Imeem is free and it let’s you mash up music you uploaded to the service in playlists and share them with your friends. Each uploaded song is checked by Snocap’s digital fingerprinting software against their library of 3 million tracks and allowed on the site if the artist has opted in. All of Snocap’s current artists have automatically been opted into the new ad driven service.
Musicians, Directors and Photographers can keep their fans informed through posting their latest creations, tour dates and other information. Media uploaded to the site can be embedded on your website, blog and social network page.
The site also offers groups, discovery tools and detailed statistics (so you can see how successful your creation has become).
