MySpace has acquire Imeem, the social music service, as it seeks to boost its music offerings. The deal, thought to be worth less than $1 million, will give MySpace access to Imeem’s 16 million users, as well as its suite of mobile applications and services.
Owen Van Natta, chief executive of MySpace, said that key Imeem features would eventually be integrated in to his company’s own MySpace Music offering.
“MySpace Music and Imeem share a common vision and commitment to further enabling the socialisation of content across the web,” he wrote in a blog post. “This deal will allow us to leverage Imeem’s industry-leading technology and, over time, meaningfully integrate their products into the MySpace Music experience.”
Van Natta hailed Imeem for pioneering the ad-supported digital music model, and for being one of the first music-streaming services to allow users to embed music and video playlists on other sites, including MySpace.
“In the coming weeks, our team will be working to take the aspects of Imeem that users love and migrate them to MySpace Music,” he said. “We’ll start that transition today by redirecting Imeem users to MySpace Music to discover their favourite music. As quickly as possible, we’ll be working to offer users the Imeem playlists they’ve created on MySpace Music.”
Van Natta invited Imeem users to try out MySpace Music while the handover took place. Four senior Imeem executives, including the company’s chief executive and chief technical officer, will be moving to MySpace to facilitate the transition.
Van Natta, who joined MySpace from Facebook in April, is focused on revamping the site’s music offering. It also adds some missing pieces in the MySpace Music jigsaw, including an Imeem mobile application that allows users to stream music to the Apple iPhone and handsets running Google Android.
Rival services such as Spotify are leading the way for free online music-streaming services. Spotify charges users a premium of £9.99 per month to listen to songs on their phone, and to access tracks on their computer without adverts.