Many years ago, I remember reading Trey Anastasio from Phish saying, in an article about what MP3’s would mean to the music industry, that he felt sure that eventually, every song would have an advertisement attached to the end of it.
In an eerie case of artist meanderings on technology imitating reality, Trey Anastasio was correct: thanks to a new partnerships, users can hear music for free — with advertising attached. With 16 million users and ranked currently the #4 most popular entertainment-multimedia site in the United States, music social networking site imeem.com has partnered with Snocap to offer digital delivery of copyrighted music that can be shared between site members. The not-so-revolutionary idea has been bandied about for years, but imeem is putting it into practice, potentially to avoid having to pay damages to Warner Brothers — the company who last month sued them for copyright infringement.
It will be interesting and exciting to see the direction that this takes.
1Marc Cohen on Jun 21, 2007 at 2:09 pm:
I support any new ad-supported music model. The imeem/Snocap partnership is not, however, very interesting. Streaming of indie bands supported by video ads on a computer mp3 player is not new or innovative. Unfortunately, this effort is not likely to attract much (if any) advertisers.
To stay up-to-date on advertising supported music check out the Ad-Supported Music Central blog:
http://ad-supported-music.blogspot.com/
2E.J. on Jun 21, 2007 at 3:11 pm:
This is getting creepy. This is like an ad for your blog which is an ad for the product that you created to generate ads inserted into music.
I am getting headached.
3Tom Wilson on Jul 8, 2007 at 7:34 pm:
SNOCRAP sucks when it comes to selling music downloads. I use SoundStation and its way better and free, check it out now at http://www.soundloud.com.