While browsing around tonight I stumbled upon a discusson thread about imeem. The thread starter was “addicted” to the site even though he was never into other social networks like MySpace. Seeing the imeem name caught my surprise. It’s been atleast 18 months since I’d last heard heard anything new from the company. Apparently they have completely re-strategized and launched a new site with a new focus:

IMEEM is an online community where people and groups can upload, share, tag, and playlist the media they care about.

The new imeem is a very nicely done site. The site design, flash widgets, and profile customization tools are beautifully done. As the quote above suggests, the core of the site is that users can upload music and video (and photos of course) and directly share them on their profile. With imeem’s embedded flash players, you can stream music and video directly through your browser. You can also create your own playlist containing any songs and video you find on the site. As you would expect, there is an imeem flash widget which is embeddable into any other webpage (MySpace pages are the obvious one but I have a hunch this will get blocked by MySpace since this directly competes with MySpace’s own music and video widgets).

The first click I made on imeem was to view the most played songs of this week. As you might expect, songs from hot artists like Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake were in the top 10. Not too surprising right? Well I wasn’t surprised that those artists were amongst the most viewed, but then I looked at who uploaded those songs. As you might have suspected, it wasn’t the artist or label. It was just random users who uploaded the mp3’s of those songs. My first thought was “holy crap! if this is legal it’s pure genius!”. After all, imeem already has a impressively large library of popular songs that has been uploaded by users. In addition, unlike iTunes and other music services, you get to listen to the full song, not 30-second previews. All of this for free.

I dug a little deeper on the site and sure enough on the upload page, I saw this message: “Only upload your own music and video, or stuff you have permission to share. Uploading media that you do not own can be a violation of the artist’s copyrights and against the law if you do not have legal permission from the copyright owner. Your account may be shut down if you don’t follow the imeem terms of service.”

In the site’s Terms of Service, a statement to the same effect is found including this: “Uploading copyrighted media or content without the explicit consent of the copyright owner will result in cancellation in any and all of your accounts.” Judging by the countless number of users that have uploaded commercial music and whose accounts remain active, it’s clear imeem is not enforcing this.

And, really, why should they? As YouTube’s story proves, it’s best to just give your users what they want - free access to commercial content - and place the burden on copyright holders to enforce their rights over the content that’s uploaded to the site. As is now well-known, according to the DMCA Title II: OCILLA, as long as online services promptly remove infringing material upon notification by the copyright holder, the service has a safe harbor against copyright liability. As you can see from the Alexa graph above (both Quantcast and Compete.com show a similar pattern), this strategy is working great. imeem’s traffic stats have blown up in just the past four months.

What I find most strange is the company’s VP Marketing is a guy by the name of Steve Jang who, prior to joining imeem, was Director of Digital Business Development at EMI Music. So I think it’s safe to assume imeem’s management is well versed in digital rights. Which leads me to wonder what the heck is going on then? I was hoping to find some recent news articles about imeem but found none. With imeem’s tremendous growth of late, there is bound to be some buzz soon. Hopefully, along with the buzz there will be a conversation about the copyright issues concerning imeem. Until then, I’m confused…

NOTE: I should point out that just like YouTube, imeem does have plenty of legitimate content as well. In fact, the #1 played song in the past month, with over 1.6m plays, is Body Rock by Mike Relm. In this case, Mike Relm himself uploaded the song onto his own imeem profile page. There are other songs by independent artists which have made the most played chart. So clearly imeem, like MySpace, is a proven venue for artists to promote their music.