The Fall of imeem
This post has been migrated from my older blog A Bad Case of Nostalgia.
imeem
For a long while now I’ve been using online music service imeem to listen to any music that I don’t have in my own personal library. The service was amazing, with its massive library, you could add almost any song by any artist to a playlist in your profile and listen to it whenever you wanted. There were no limits as to how many playlists you could have or the length of those playlists. The service remained free by playing short (less than 10 second) advertisements in between songs. This would seem like it could be annoying, but an advertisement would only be played maybe every twenty or thirty songs. imeem was an amazing alternative to services like Last.fm or Pandora Radio that would only allow you to pick an artist you liked, but then would populate your playlist with similar artists rather than the songs you want.
You may notice that I’ve been using the past-tense throughout this article. That’s because yesterday, without warning, imeem was bought out by MySpace and closed down almost immediately. Apparently MySpace is adding imeem-like functionality into MySpace Music, which is basically what imeem was except injected with all the suckiness of MySpace. The fact that this happened doesn’t bother me quite as much as the fact that we (the users of imeem) were given no notice whatsoever. All our playlists, friend-lists, and favorited music and videos were just flushed from the face of the internet. It was known that imeem was having financial issues due to their licensing budgets being nearly constantly tapped out, but no one thought it would just disappear overnight.
Grooveshark
Not wanting to go to services with heavy restrictions on what I can listen to, I began searching for another service like imeem. After a little while of surfing I came across GrooveShark. Grooveshark is nearly identical to imeem, with a similarly sized library even! The interface is a bit different, in some ways better and in other ways not so much. The biggest change I like is that the playlist editor and media player are integrated into the same screen, so you don’t have to fiddle with various links to get to where you want to go. Thus far the only thing I’ve found that imeem had that Grooveshark doesn’t is an iPhone app. imeem’s app wasn’t as good as their online service, functioning more like Pandora Radio in that you would pick the artist you want to listen to, but from there everything (song and artist) were randomized. It would seem though, that a Grooveshark app is currently in the approval stage and that it aims to provide the same functionality as their website! While I am kind of sad to see imeem gone, I am quite happy that I have found Grooveshark in its stead. Now if I could just remember what was on my playlists…