One of our favorite music streaming apps is no more. Recently, MySpace purchased Imeem and was quick to shut the online music service down. Imeem is officially being integrated into MySpace Music but for the time being, Imeem seems virtually dead and two large issues have arisen.
First problem: Imeem ran the Snocap music storefront system used by thousands of independent artists (many on MySpace). You’ve probably seen a Snocap widget in place on a MySpace page, it was a music player that allowed bands to sell/play/share their own music. Snocap would handle the sales and process payments to any artist owed more than $20. When MySpace bought Imeem, they only bought certain parts, and the outstanding payments to the artists weren’t part of the deal. MySpace purchased Imeem for under $1mil and sources close to the deal say there isn’t likely to be money left for artists (some waiting for payments for more than a year).
Second, all CLIQs shipped with Imeem pre-installed (with no way to remove it). Justin was the first to notice and mention to me that the apps (including others, such as Shazam and Telenav) weren’t able to be uninstalled. When you go into Settings and try to manually remove the application there is no uninstall button to be found. When you try to access Imeem, you get a failed login and nothing else (see a full gallery below). Every CLIQ now has a brick of an app sitting on it, irremovable. I’d assume Motorola will fix this with a future update, but that’s the whole point of giving the user the point to remove their own apps in the first place.
Let’s not get it twisted, the two problems have nothing to do with one another (Motorola had nothing at all to do with the Imeem sale) but there are a lot of losers in the deal. The one common is MySpace, which is where I’ll place most of the blame. I haven’t followed MySpace news or updates for a few years now, so please correct me if I missed any of the finer points, but to me it sounds like hasty planning and short foresight have again inconvenienced thousands of users.
As it stands now, all past parts of the Imeem site just point to a landing page for MySpace Music. MySpace Music has stated its working to merge all the user profiles and playlists over to MySpace and should be sending out emails when the details are ready. That just leaves one issue: who really wants to use MySpace nowadays?
