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Imeem, the popular social network for music sharing, has acquired music site Snocap, which lets bands set their own licensing terms for music downloads.

The deal was expected; we covered early reports here.

Imeem had already partnered with Snocap, we reported last year, to pay a share of ad revenue to music content owners using Snocap’s technology.

According to the company’s statement today:

This acquisition provides imeem with powerful content identification technology, a comprehensive Digital Registry and an enhanced team of executive and engineering talent. Additionally, the SNOCAP acquisition expands the mix of products and services imeem offers to artists and music labels, giving them new opportunities to market, promote and make money from their music through widgets and applications.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Snocap has 110,000 users of its MyStores product, among unsigned and unaffiliated artists, and independent and major record labels. They include The Rolling Stones, Coldplay, Diddy, Nickelback and The Shins.

Imeem, a popular social network for music sharing, is acquiring music site Snocap, which lets bands set their own licensing terms for music downloads, according to TechCrunch.

No source was named, and the amount isn’t being disclosed.

Imeem had already partnered with Snocap, we reported last year, to pay a share of ad revenue to music content owners using Snocap’s technology.

Snocap had fallen on tough times recently, and it’s possible that one of its investors, Morgenthaler Ventures, decided Snocap made a good fit with Imeem, another of the firm’s investments.

Imeem also recently acquired Anywhere.fm, a Y Combinator company billing itself as “iTunes for the Web” (our coverage).

San Francisco-based Snocap, which wanted to let bands set their own licensing terms for music downloaded on the Web, is best known as the company started by Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning, although Fanning has since left to found gaming company Rupture. Struggling to find a business model, Snocap cut its staff by 60 percent in October, and was rumored to be up for sale (our coverage).

As TechCrunch and others are noting, Imeem probably prefers this outcome to Snocap going under.

Yesterday, we wrote about Kobalt Music Group, which is pursuing something similar to Snocap’s failed business model. But as we noted, there’s a key difference — Kobalt doesn’t just license music, it publishes music too.

Snocap, the company that wanted to let bands set their own licensing terms for music downloads across the Web, has cut its staff by 60 percent, CNET has confirmed.

The San Francisco company has struggled to define a business model amid quick change in the industry, and recently had moved into new areas, setting up online stories for musicians at various sites. It said its technology can track the usage of music online, and ensure that it is being licensed properly, according to copyright. The stores were a way for musicians to sell the music. A good idea, but a fragile one considering it needed to find a way to make money from it.
We’ve been barraged by meaningless press releases from the company - four in the last month alone — that try to drum up publicity. A recent one was for aTreasure Trunk contest at the Treasure Island music festival in San Francisco.

Snocap was best known for being the post-Napster effort by Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning. Fanning had since left the company, however, starting his own gaming company, Rupture.

The blog ValleyWag first reported the story, and said the company is for sale, and a spokeswoman didn’t dispute that.

In September 2006, Snocap announced a deal to sell music on MySpace, allowing bands to sell music for whatever price they wanted, in line with Snocap’s model. Snocap would get a small cut. That deal appears to still be in place.

The company was backed with $25 million from Ron Conway, Morgenthaler Ventures and WaldenVC.

Updated

Today the arrival of the iPhone will leave time for little else.

Here’s a smattering of companies already exploiting the iPhone’s launch for a little publicity of their own:

Zoho offers iPhone version — The Pleasanton, Calif. online web application company is offering its Zoho office applications for the iPhone, called the iZoho. This allows users to view documents (and edit docs), spreadsheets and presentations. Zoho says it has simplified its interface especially for the iPhone.

Visto Mobile announces support for iPhone — Corporate email can be accessed through an IMAP connection to the iPhone’s built-in email application (announcement here).

Etelos has customer relations management (CRM) for the phone — See here, and here.

Updated to correct for an error in the New York Times piece:
EMI Music and Snocap announce MyStore partnership — Snocap will sell the label’s music through its MyStores, online stores that people can add to blogs or Internet sites. This time, it will play music from a major label that is compatible with the iPod. So far, Snocap has only sold independent label music in the MP3 format (NYT has details.)

More here from Read/WriteWeb on the iPhone development frenzy.

Update: Cellswapper lets you exchange your phone contract, letting you get out of your current plan by finding someone else who will take it over — so that you can afford the rather expensive iPhone, and not pay a termination fee. (Our coverage here.)

Updated

San Francisco start-up Imeem, a Web site focused on letting users share music and other media playlists, has come out of nowhere.

It now boasts 16 million unique users a month, and grabbing enough attention that it needs to start protecting content owners. It will announce tomorrow a partnership with Snocap, another San Francisco company, to identify the music streamed at Imeem, so that Imeem can pay a share of ad revenue to music content owners.

Snocap’s technology gives each music track a unique signature, and can identify the music when it is uploaded by Imeem users. It then gives content owners a platform to dictate the terms of their music’s use — including the right to negotiate the ad revenue share they get when a track is streamed over Imeem.

The companies said the ad-sharing model is a first of its kind. It is significant because competing sites like Google’s YouTube are struggling to come to terms with content owners.

Snocap says its registry has three million tracks.

This is a significant turnaround for Imeem, which two years ago was working on a peer-to-peer product that didn’t go anywhere.

Much of the music on Imeem comes from independent artists. But it says it has partnered with Virgin Records, Nettwerk Records, SubPop Records, Beggars Group, Domino Records and Warner Independent Pictures.

Imeem’s founder Dalton Caldwell says the site is the fastest growing on the Web, citing Hitwise statistics.

Snocap’s already powers MySpace’s music store, however Snocap chief executive Rusty Rueff says the Imeem partnership takes things a step further. The Imeem deal lets any content owner stream their content online (MySpace allows downloads). The other difference is the ad-revenue share, letting users listen to the music for free.

The two companies have a common investor in Morgenthaler Ventures.

YouTube, the two-year-old San Mateo start-up that raced ahead to become the leader of online video sharing, is facing the fight of its life.

Microsoft’s launch of its YouTube clone, called the Soapbox, made official today — see announcement with an offering of a way to sign up for a beta account, is only the latest challenge. (The dancing man with MSN colors strikes us as somewhat unhip, but then what can we expect a corporate giant to do? In fact, when looked at again, we see it is a cute metaphor for an old fogey getting with the program.)

Its fate may really lie in excruciating talks taking place with the Universal Music Group, which must decide whether to take YouTube to court or instead embrace and even invest in it.

The YouTube story is significant because there’s more confusion about YouTube’s prospects, its inherent uniqueness and its legality than ever before. Moreover, there’s more at stake in the world of online video than most of us realized just a few months ago. It is where movies, music and advertising meet — and billions are at stake, and anxious incumbent music giants are angry. The proliferation of broadband, new technologies making loading videos dead easy, and the high price of buying music compared to simply sharing it free on YouTube, is giving that upstart the edge. –>

Here in Silicon Valley, the buzz is all about video, music and then more video — and throw in some talk about how to take it mobile. There’s a new announcement every day. (Just yesterday: Silicon Valley chip giant Intel announced a deal with AOL to place AOL Video onto Intel’s Viiv home computers. SanDisk, the Milpitas maker of music players competing with Apple’s iPod, signed a deal with Seattle’s RealNetworks, owner of music service Rhapsody, to imbed that service direclty into its Sansa e200 MP3 player. And Google is reporteldy talking with Apple about having Google vidoes downloadable to the iPod).

On the plus side for YouTube, the company announced a deal with Warner, whereby Warner will open its music library to YouTube users to integrate into their videos. But public details of the deal are few, and Warner still has the right for veto, and the royalty and revenue split agreement is unknown.

That deal came a few hours after entrepreneur Mark Cuban wrote an aggressive but notable piece titled “The coming dramatic decline of YouTube,” and outlined why YouTube is going to get sued and will implode just like Napster did in Web 1.0, even though Napster eventually cut deal with Bertelsman. In a bizarre coincidence, the Napster remnant company is losing money and just yesterday put itself on the block, as mentioned). The problem, Cuban said, is that you can search for songs on YouTube, and have them play, while minimizing the video screen — even those songs are copyrighted and no one is getting paid. If you read the comments on Cuban’s blog, you will see that outright confusion prevails about YouTube’s prospects.

YouTube’s fate may really lie in talks it’s having with Universal Music Group and Sony BMG. Fresh reports say these are talks about distribution deals. YouTube has long said it is engaged in talks, so it is difficult to say how real these reports are. Just last week Universal threatened to sue. Now apparently YouTube has offered to sell an equity stake to the labels, though that’s an easy offer to make when you are against the wall.

Finally, as Rafat at PaidContent points out, the filtering technology YouTube has to implement by the end of this year, to meet the accord with Warner Music, is significant. It is similar to technology already offered by both Audible Magic and Snocap, which works on audio — the main area of concern right now. If YouTube implements this rigorously and agrees to take down any infringing content that somehow slips past those filters, it has a pretty good defense, no?

This will be a drama to watch.

Here’s a roundup of relevant Silicon Valley action, after the long weekend:

Yahoo employee sets up Flickr on his phone, and “captures” thief — Yahoo Web designer Ben Clemens, of Berkeley, said his phone was stolen, but that a program he’d installed made the phone automatically take pictures and upload them to Flickr. And so the phone took photos of the thief, and their Chihuahua. Here is an example (see photo). This is a pretty amazing story, indeed some people believe it must be concocted. Here is the full story. Clemens says he is too simple of a guy to have made up such an outrageous story — even if it does give favorable publicity to Flickr, which is owned by his company Yahoo.

Sequoia’s latest company called “loopt,” but sounds familiar — In Paul Graham’s interview with Techcrunch, we find that his firm’s next company to launch, called loopt, is a “mobile presence” service also funded by Sequoia. Looking for more info, we found the following: Based in Palo Alto, California, loopt is a Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates-backed startup “building a revolutionary service to change the way people use mobile phones to keep in touch with close friends. Using new location-based technologies, loopt lets you know where friends in your private network are by automatically updating maps on your mobile handset and the web.” You know, this sounds very much like that start-up once called Radiate, but which switched its name to Flipt. Now loopt. Third time lucky?

MySpace offers music store to sell MP3s on MySpace; more sophisticated than it appears — MySpace will use Snocap, a start-up founded by Napster’s Shawn Fanning to deliver a competing service to eMusic, an online music store that also offers MP3s. eMusic already has the second largest market share for downloads, behind iTunes.

NewsCorp, MySpace’s parent, may also make an investment into Snocap, acccording to a story in the NYT. The MP3 format allows for the music to be played on the Apple iPod, though the format doesn’t offer any copy protection. It’s therefore unlikely the major labels will want to participate in this system any time soon. The MySpace plan lets artists sell their music at any price they want. MySpace will charge a band or label a fixed fee of around 45 cents, which it will share with Snocap, according to Snocap’s chief executive, Rusty Rueff, in an interview with the NYT. The iTunes store, by contrast, keeps about 35 cents from each purchase, apparently from a willingness to sacrifice some profit in exchange for increased demand for the iPod.

Snocap’s back-end, though, is more sophisticated than most media coverage so far would have you believe, or at least that’s we’re led to believe from a briefing with Gary Little, a venture capitalist at Morgenthaler Ventures, a few days ago. Gary is an investor in Snocap, and he said the company has developed a sophisticated video and audio fingerprinting technology that can identify songs on the Internet. It has also created a registry for digital content and the copyright that governs it. No other service does this, Gary told us. An artist on MySpace can then register at Snocap and define the rules by which their music can be bought — for example setting a track at 19 cents, or an album at $2. He said the format is simply pasted — in the form of HTML — at the MySpace store. The music can be sold directly from a member’s profile page.

Meanwhile, check out reports that Apple will start selling full-length movie downloads on iTunes by mid-September, apparently for $14.99 for new releases and $9.99 for older movies. That could hurt Walmart, which is reportedly paying more for the DVDs it sells. And iTunes users could burn a DVD, thus undercutting Walmart pretty badly. However, looks like Apple has so far only signed up Disney.

The “cheap” Barbarians — Noteworthy story in Forbes about all these start-ups that are offering chips and software at ridiculously low prices, and thus threatening to sack the walled fortresses of Sun, Microsoft, and BEA. It focuses on Bill Coleman, former chief executive of BEA, who is always refreshingly vocal. He recently called Network Appliances’ Warmenhoven to task for calling the stock-options investigation a “witch hunt.”

Video company YouTube is poaching Yahoo employees — YouTube has just hired Yahoo Treasurer Gideon Yu to join the startup as its first chief financial officer, according to the WSJ. Earlier this year, YouTube hired Tony Nethercutt from Yahoo to build its ad sales team.

Mywavez count down — The secretive Menlo Park company, which we mentioned here, is now launching in three weeks, according to its site.

Video site Guba will pay you 25 cents for every new account that is created via your embedded video — (Ok, this news is a bit stale, but merits a mention as it wasn’t covered at SiliconBeat/VetureBeat during our two-day switchover). The offering by Guba may seem like a scam, but it is one more example of the scrappy style needed for survival in this competitive area. Basically, if someone goes to your site, sees a video, and then is inspired to register for a Guba account, you get 25 cents.