iMeem is a music and video streaming service that also has very popular applications on Facebook and MySpace. iMeem has over 50 employees working in San Francisco, California and the company started around November 2003. iMeem has close to $50 million in total funding since they started. Over 100 million people have used their service at some point and they have over 30 million registered users. Last year the company hired Montgomery and Co. to help find a buyer.
The reason why the acquisition hasn’t take place as of yet is because there is stakeholder approval pending. The amount for buying out the company is not expected to be high considering the amount of venture capital that iMeem had to take in for survival.
Once getting bought out, iMeem will more than likely be rolled into MySpace Music.
Warner Music Group filed a financial report last week and it stated that they wrote-off $33 million in equity and debt from Imeem and Lala. Imeem is a music social network and Lala is a streaming website. Below is an excerpt from the report:
During the quarter ended March 31, 2009, the Company determined that its cost-method investments in digital venture capital companies were impaired largely due to the current economic environment and changing business conditions from the time of the initial investment. In accordance with FAS 157, the Company used Level 3 inputs to determine the fair value of these investments, which include management’s estimates of assumptions that market participants would use in pricing these assets. As a result, the Company recorded charges of $29 million, including $16 million to write-off its investment in imeem, inc. (“imeem”) and $11 million to write-down its investment in lala media, inc (“lala”) to its estimated fair value.
Imeem recently raised additional funding and is putting together an iPhone application. Imeem’s valuation was north of $200 million at one point but has fallen since. Warner invested $20 million in Lala and $15 million in Imeem.
Amit Chowdhry | May 13, 2009 | 213 views | Comments Categorized under imeem
Imeem is a social network that made for music fans. The problem with their business model is having to deal with the music industry itself and dealing with all of the licensing fees and record labels. The company has been increasing revenue by charging for downloads.
The company was in such a bad financial position that they almost considered shutting down. However the company raised funding earlier this month to keep them running in business. The investors and the dollar amount involved are not clear, but rumor has it that the previous investors are involved.
Imeem had previously raised $18.8 million in funding from First Round, Sequoia, Warner Brothers, and Morgenthalter Ventures. Other angel investors include Mark Goines, Ron Conway, Geoff Ralston, and Sy Fahimi.
On May 20, Imeem will have an application released for the iPhone as well. The application will have the ability to create custom playlists, have personalized music recommendations, and stream playlists from their Imeem profiles. The application will be free.
In these pressing times when you hear about lay-offs constantly, it is rather difficult to breed job loyalty out of people. Especially when some people are hanging by a string compared to others. But that doesn’t mean you can’t lose your sense of humor. Jason Shugars quit Google and sent a funny e-mail before he left. “So long, suckers! I’m out!” stated Jason in the e-mail sent to 5,000 of his former fellow Google employees.
In the rest of the goodbye e-mail, Shugars reminisced about good times working at the search engine company. This includes the time when he put cake down his pants at a sales conference. He also stole his boss’ $8,000 leather couch. And he also sang “Hit Me Baby One More Time” while wearing a mini-skirt and braids.
“It took me a long time to write it,” stated Shugars. “I didn’t want to send out a stale ‘good working with you, please reach me here’ e-mail. Who wants that?” Shugars, 34, left Google to become Director of Ad Operations of Imeem. Imeem is a music social media company that receives abou 25 million visitors per month and gains about 65,000 new users per day.
Below is a video of Shugars being featured on The Today Show.
Warner Music Group Corp. (NYSE:WMG) has invested in two Silicon Valley online music companies, Imeem and Lala.com. Imeem is a music, video, and photo sharing social networking website. Lala is a music streaming website.
Within the last year, imeem acquired SNOCAP and Anywhere.FM. imeem has over 24 million uniques per month and their widget reaches over 100 million users per month.
Lala.com has 5 million songs in their catalog that users can play for free. Users can add songs to their collection for 10 cents and buy MP3s for 79 cents.
“imeem shares SNOCAP’s focus on enabling artists to promote their music in new ways,”stated CEO of imeem, Rusty Rueff.
Music streaming company, imeem has announced recently that they have acquired SNOCAP, a Digital Rights Management company started by Shawn “Napster” Fanning. SNOCAP owns their own digital registry platform that allows independent artists to control their music distribution. SNOCAP has over 7 million songs in their digital registry.
Financial details were undisclosed.
imeem spent the past year ramping up advertisements and partnerships. In 2007, imeem made deals with Universal, EMI, Warner Brothers, and Sony. While SNOCAP has been MySpace’s partner for spreading independent music. Through the acquisition the COO of SNOCAP, Ali Aydar will be joining imeem as VP of Operations.
Information Source:
[1] MarketingVOX: Music Streaming Service imeem Buys Indie DRM Firm SNOCAP
