Warner streams entire catalog of music for free on imeem

July 12, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

warner-imeem.jpgWarner Music Group is offering its entire music and video catalog for free streaming on imeem, a Web site focused on letting users share music playlists.

The music is currently live on the San Francisco startup’s Web site, the company told VentureBeat Wednesday evening.

Now imeem users can make playlists with Warner music. Warner, in return, will get a piece of imeem’s ad revenue.

So music from Depeche Mode, a Warner artist, can be played freely, for example. Press the play button on the widget below, for example, which we’ve just pulled from imeem.

This partnership is significant because it is the first time a major label has offered free ad-supported access to it entire catalog of music and video to such an online sharing site. It is also remarkable because Warner (along with other labels) had sued imeem less than two months ago for copyright infringement (our coverage; scroll down). See suit here.

Imeem has grown rapidly over the past year, bosting 16 million active users. Earlier this year, it arranged to pay a share of ad revenue to music content owners, as we reported here. It recently offered free ad-supported streaming of music from other labels, but not from the majors. Competitors such as SeeqPod (our coverage) haven’t cut such deals.

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About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • That's nice. Really nice. Good one, Warner. Will I reach it from my cell as well? Like Diino.com or Orb?
  • We are at the beginning of the advertising supported music revolution. Time spent listening to recorded music is up and so too should be recording industry revenues. Ad-supporte monetizes the time people spend listening.

    Check out the Ad-Supported Music Central blog:
    http://ad-supported-music.blogspot.com/
  • Big Hugh
    "we are at the beginning of advertising-supported music revolution"...

    How is this different from Internet radio?

    OK.. I get to pick the songs, but do I actually want to do that one song at a time, or just pick a genre.
  • Dang, this is incredibly exciting... but particularly if other labels follow suit.

    I've been wanting to showcase songs -- even snippets of songs -- on my own blog for years. Rhapsody and Napster have offered limited free-song-plays, but only behind ridiculously cumbersome registrations, pop-up windows, etc. In fact, I bemoaned this situation (and presented an alternative) in this blog entry:
    http://www.bladam.com/main/entry/fair-use-mashups/

    It's shocking to me how long it's taking for labels to get the fact that... letting the world mix and match your content and passionately showcase it is going to result in MORE money -- via advertising, CD sales, download sales, merchandise, etc.

    Can't wait 'til the clue finally sinks in more broadly. And hey, thanks for highlighting this new situation with imeem. I'll definitely re-check that site out :)
  • OnTheMobile
    Speaking of cell or iPhones, music on the iPhones:
    http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/07/play-mp3-bl...
  • yeah, cool, so it's free for the end-user but is it free for imeem? How much of the company did WMG get, and how much did Imeem pay to WMG to get this deal done? If Imeem got the licenses based on revenue share ONLY - hey, great. Otherwise - let's get some answers for these questions before we get too excited. (disclosure: I run wwww.sonific.com which offers Music Widgets called songspots which are licensed to play full-length tracks from over 45.000 artists and labels, but not WMG)
  • Absolutely agree with you.
  • Loui$$ from Blogging Secret just asked me how I was displaying adsense ads only on post (item) pages and inside the post i.e. in the beginning and the end of each post. For this I use the same if statements from my hack Display widgets only on pages you prefer but widget are not involved in this one as widgets cannot go inside a post.

    First let me acknowledge the sources from which I learnt some essential adsense tricks for Blogger Beta:
  • Record labels may be taking a new route in which the music itself is only the catch to get back-end sales for other merchandise offered.

    Who knows?
  • Looks like record labels are taking a new route, where the music itself is just the way to introduce other back-end sales merchandise.

    Who knows?
  • Sorry about the double comment. I thought something wasn't working properly!