The Next Great Generation

They call us the Millennial Generation.

Dear IMEEM I miss U

I love my music Just like most people my age I study and work while listening to music. Besides my personal music library and TV music channels, I’ve tried numerous platforms: from online radios, to Pandora, to Last.fm. Then I fell in love. I found the perfect platform for me: IMEEM. It allowed me to build playlists of my favorite music or listen to songs that sound similar. Something like my personal music library meets Pandora.

IMEEM was always there for me. We were together when I studied for theology and philosophy exams (yay for Jesuit education). It was there when I designed surveys for marketing research projects. It was there when I was hanging out with friends. It was there when I was reading books. Until one day in early December when I saw the message “IMEEM is now part of MySpace Music. We are working hard to migrate all of your playlists over to MySpace Music. We’ll email you about that as soon as we have more details.”

I definitely wasn’t happy but I thought I could wait for a few days until MySpace migrated my playlists. And I’ve been waiting ever since. I guess “hard” was the key word.

I understand that MySpace tried to revive its platform by buying IMEEM and bringing new users to the Web site. It was a cool idea but it was poorly approached. The purchase and especially the situation afterward probably harmed MySpace more than it helped.

First, people were disappointed. People were sad that they lost their favorite music platform. People were upset that the hours they had spent building their playlists were wasted. Second, people saw MySpace as the old grumpy man who refused to retire. That is not a brand persona that resonates with Millennials or any other generation. People expressed their disappointment with millions tweets and Facebook updates. Someone opened RIPImeem on Twitter. I even became a fan of MySpace on Facebook to write on the wall how evil MySpace was. There was no power on earth to make me visit MySpace.com and boast its visits even by 0.00000001%.

This uproar could have easily been prevented if MySpace first migrated the playlists, closed IMEEM and allowed people to sign in with the same e-mail addresses and passwords instead of making them sign up. Then all people would have said probably was going to be “Oh, they changed the design. What do I want to listen to today?” But that didn’t happen. MySpace made it complicated and inconvenient for IMEEM users.  Instead of using MySpace Music, people switched to Pandora, Last.fm or Blip.fm.

If I get an e-mail from MySpace today saying that my playlists have been migrated, I won’t go to MySpace Music. They will have to work much harder than that to pay for the hours I spent building new playlists and updating old ones.

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12 Responses

  1. ariellecalderon says:

    Try playlist.com, you can search music and build your playlist. It's not as great as imeem, but it'll do.

  2. Christine says:

    Try Lala.com. They allow you to upload your entire music library, you can keep 25 (maybe 30?) new songs for free, and they allow you to build/share playlists. My only complaint about Lala is that once you run out of those song credits, you can only listen to each song once and then you can only listen to a 30 second snippit of it.

  3. Thanks for the suggestions. I tried Lola.com but it was not my cup of tea. Will try playlist.com

  4. PKB says:

    I used IMEEM a lot too because it was a great way to find abscure and complete CDs. When I saw that it was now property of Myspace I knew that IMEEM would never be the same. Myspace is the evil walmart corp of the interwebs. Check this article in the Financial Times for the whole business side of their rise and epic fall.

    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fd9ffd9c-dee5-11de-ad...

    I listen to slacker sometimes. It's pretty much like Pandora. You might like it.

  5. Some of us haven't been able to move on to anything else. I loved this post, it completely captured the betrayal I felt by the MySpace acquisition. Every now and then, I find myself typing in imeem.com and i still can't un-bookmark it. It's too much like giving in I feel. Maybe they'll do like AT&T did to Cingular, and buy themselves back. But I'm with you, I will never visit or join MySpace music. Unless, of course, I have a job that uses it.

    #RIPIMEEM

  6. Marro "musicHOLIC" says:

    I REALLY MISS IMEEM~!

  7. My sentiments exactly. I too spent a lot of time creating a library on Imeem. It's already April 2010 and my playlists haven't been migrated to MySpace. Cold day in hell I will ever use MySpace Music now. I use Lala now. Trouble is they scan the library on your computer and see if the songs have copyrights. If they don't, what they “think” the song is now put in your Lala library. Some song titles on my computer are not even the same songs Lala thought they were, and are now in my Lala library. I let Lala scan my computer for songs, then disabled the feature. It is really intrusive. Lala is the best I have found so far, but nowhere near as good as Imeem. I use Last FM and MOG, but Imeem was the best.

  8. More bad news, Apple acquired Lala in December 2009, and it will be shutting down May 31st. 2010.

  9. Wow, I hadn't heard about it. I guess it is a business opportunity for someone out there

  10. Nathan says:

    I’ve been using Grooveshark for a few days now and it seems to be the closest thing to Imeem that I’ve come across.

    I miss Imeem for it’s user-uploaded content. No other site I’ve seen has had the same format.

    I miss my music T_T

  11. BJ says:

    mediafire or similar sites, has everything. I do miss creating and embedding a playlist to share amongst my friends though.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. [...] Jason Kincaid wrote a very interesting post today.   Here’s a quick excerpt:Besides my personal music library and TV music channels, I’ve tried numerous platforms: from online radios, to Pandora, to Last.fm. Then I fell in love. I found the perfect platform for me: IMEEM. It allowed me to build playlists of my … [...]

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