The music discovery Web site imeem.com officially launched its very own iPhone app on Thursday, May 14. Imeem's app is free and bears a resemblance to similar offerings from Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker, offering the ability to stream, search, and purchase music over Wi-Fi or cellular connections.
But before you write off the Imeem app (download) as some late-arriving Last.fm wannabe, there's one killer feature to be aware of: cloud storage. Apps like Last.fm will go so far as to create personalized radio stations based on a random selection of songs from your collection, but the Imeem app allows you to call up any song or album in your collection and play it without the restrictions associated with most services (i.e. limited skips, and the inability to play songs from the same artist back-to-back).
In order to stream music from your personal collection, you first need to upload your music to imeem.com from your desktop using its free Mac/PC-compatible client. Now before you go thinking that you can upload that 300GB iTunes library to Imeem and stream it anywhere in the world, there's a catch. Imeem won't charge you for the first 100 songs you upload to the site, but anything more than that will require a VIP service ($29.99 per year for up to 1,000 songs, or $99.99 per year for up to 20,000).
Beyond the appeal of streaming your music collection form the cloud, the rest of the Imeem application falls somewhere between the simplicity of the Pandora app, and the more personalized, social approach of Last.fm. The main menu screen offers ... Read more
Music service Imeem has released its first mobile application--and it's not for the iPhone. The application is designed for Google's Android operating system, first launching on T-Mobile USA's G1 handset.
The free app, which will be available through the Android Market, doesn't let users stream music on-demand. But they can create customized radio stations, check out recommendations, and buy music from Amazon.com's MP3 service. Because the application is connected to PC-based Imeem accounts, users can see mobile changes they've made, such as marking an artist as a "favorite," reflected on their Web-based profile. Right now, the only revenue stream is from affiliate sales with Amazon MP3, but executives say that will change eventually.
Pick your favorites on the G1 handset's Imeem app.
(Credit: Imeem)"It's the first time we've ever had a mobile version of Imeem, which is pretty exciting for us," Matt Graves, vice president of marketing, told CNET News. "It opens up an entirely new market for us, a new demographic, and a new market of people who may not have been exposed to Imeem before."
He said there wasn't a particular reason why Imeem chose the Android Market over Apple's App Store, currently the hot spot for mobile applications.
"I don't think it was Android over the iPhone. We are interested in reaching mobile consumers," Graves said. "It seemed like a good opportunity for us and a good platform."
While Imeem has "nothing to announce just yet" about an iPhone app, Graves wouldn't rule out the possibility of developing one.
Here's the other news from Imeem: it is not jumping on the Silicon Valley layoff bandwagon, or at least that's what Graves said.
"We started being conservative before it was apparent in the market that you had to be," he explained, adding that the company will have "no layoffs."
That's good news for Imeem, considering that some other companies in the digital-music space are suffering. Cash-strapped Web radio start-up Pandora, which has blamed the royalty fees for online streaming, let go of 20 employees on Friday.
"I can't really speak to Pandora's business," Graves said, "(but) the DMCA radio rates are reasonable, I think. I think that we've got a pretty varied set of revenue streams."
MyFlashFetish player
(Credit: CNET Networks)If you're the sort of Web surfer who hangs out on social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook or someone who frequents MP3 blogs, you've surely seen and used one of the free Flash audio players in this article. All of the Web-based apps below let you add a functional music player to your home page or blog with no muss and very little fuss.
In this article, I am focusing on Web software that lets you create custom playlists with specific songs that you want to include. I also include Last.fm (the half in my count) because I love it, but its embeddable player works by offering a personal radio station based on your musical preferences. The music is fantastic, but you can't pick specific songs to add to your playlist.
I have compiled my own mixes using all of these players at a new blog. (I even used MyFlashFetish twice!) Go to MP3 Playlist Overload on Blogger to listen to some of my favorite music and try out the Flash players. I'm sure that there are lots of other free, embeddable music players online, so please tell me about your favorites in the comments. ... Read more
Editor's note: This is Part One of a two-part series on multinetwork IM clients. Don't worry, we haven't forgotten about all-in-one Web and mobile chatting.
There's a lot to chat about in the multiprotocol IM universe. Pidgin just debuted as a full-fledged version 2.0, replacing the much-loved Gaim. Trillian is gearing up to wow us all with its gleaming browser-based Astra version, and every day more and more plug-ins pop up to make this breed of protocol-bridging IM clients more extensible and functional.
If you're still logging into three separate chat services to contact your friends, it's time to consider these consolidated options.... Read more
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