Errol Pierre-Louis |
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imeem by Errol Pierre-Louis Ratings: 4/5 Bottom Line: Imeem is the latest networking site to provide fans and artists alike with a thriving online content-sharing community. It beats out similar sites like MOG and Last.FM when it comes to ease of use and the amount of full-length streaming music and video content available. Unlike most online music sites, imeem has fully interactive licenses giving you the freedom to fast-forward through songs and create custom playlists as you see fit. Pros: Allows you to fast-forward and create playlist unlike most online music sites. Quick, easy playlist features. Superb, easily customizable user profiles. Large selection of full-length licensed tracks. Great way for artists—well known or not—to get their work out to the public and get paid for doing so. Cons: Lacks the advanced features needed to narrow searches by attributes such as artist, genre, or album. Many major labels are represented only by 30-second clips. Full Review: Who wouldn't love to discover and sample new music at will? But how can you indulge your musical urges without dishing out too much cash or having the RIAA hunt you down for pirated MP3s? You sign up at imeem, that's how. Imeem is an online community that has teamed up with content providers to give users quality, legal streaming content. It's an excellent site (for artists and fans alike) for promoting and sharing content through cool-looking, easily customizable pages. As an added bonus, musicians with licensed content on the site are compensated every time you play their songs or videos. Imeem partners directly with labels for, what imeem calls, "fully interactive on-demand licenses." This allows users to fast-forward through songs and create their own playlist, things you can't do on sites like Pandora that only have the typical Internet radio license. So far imeem has one major label, Warner, and several indie labels on board. Imeem earns revenue by selling ad space. With advertisers footing the bill, users get free access to streaming movies and songs, and artists get paid for content appearing on imeem. The site uses digital fingerprinting technology to track songs from content providers. If a song or video falls under a partner label, it will stream in its entirety. If imeem doesn't have a license to play the track, you get only a 30-second snippet. Licensed or not, you can only enjoy content via streaming from imeem. However, links are included to iTunes and Amazon.com if you'd like to purchase songs for listening offline. Although it doesn't have most of the artists out there, imeem has great deal of music and video already, and makes interacting with other users fun. Getting Started The main reason to check out imeem is for the movies and videos. Imeem gives you all the tools you need to create quick playlists and discover new music. You can do all this without joining the site, but to enjoy the full Imeem experience—sharing and listening to user playlists, uploading content, crafting page themes, and more—you have to create your own profile. Imeem has the usual social-networking profile setup with two added features. A blue privacy bubble globe appears next to every fill-in field. Clicking on one of these makes that particular piece of information public, for friends only, or for your eyes only. You also have the option of creating custom fields in addition to the typical music, interest, and movie sections already present. Imeem lets you personally determine how your main icon will appear on the page, letting you magnify, shrink, or crop as you like. This is a handy option when you don't want to let the site's programming crunch down your photo and hurt image quality. The profile layouts on imeem beat the pants off other social-networking sites I've seen. Most sites' profiles either require you to write (or borrow) extensive HTML code to customize your page or allow as little customization as possible. Imeem has hit the sweet spot between the chaotic free-for-all of MySpace and the one-size-fits-all approach of Facebook. The Theme Editor tools let you easily customize your page so that you can change colors, fonts, and add images—all without relying on HTML code or a third-party layout generator. You can also go nuts with the Randomizer button to produce your own quick and wacky layout. When you're done, you can save your theme to your personal theme library. Users have the option of keeping their custom themes private or sharing them with others by adding a Save Theme link onto their page. If you're impressed by the layout on another user's page, simply click the Save Theme link on their page to apply their theme to your own page. Once your profile is set, you can start uploading your favorite songs or movies to the site. Any user can upload music or video files to site. You'll be able to listen to any content you upload to imeem; but again, visitors to your page will hear only 30-second snippets of any nonlicensed content. Finding Content Imeem provides a great resource for finding and cross-referencing music with user-generated input. Browsing what's popular, top-rated, or most played can give you a good idea of what's hot in the music world. You can search for content by keyword and narrow it down by music, videos, photos, groups, and more. The search yields the most relevant results at the top and less relevant toward the bottom. Though this isn't bad, I'd have liked to see more advanced search options to narrow your search down by artist, album, or genre. Finding other users on imeem is a random affair, as on Fotolog. There's no way to search by region or other attributes, as on Facebook or MySpace. Making friends on imeem requires you to rely on musical taste or contacts you know from outside the site. Once you build your list of imeem friends, you can track their recent media to see what they have been listening to recently. Imeem has also added a Recently Popular feature that that lets you see what songs are popular in your friends' network. Finding people who share your taste is an excellent way to discover new music. Media tracker and the ability browse playlists helps the discovery process. Clicking on a title takes you to a player set in the theme of the user who uploaded it. You can then add the song to your own playlist or build a QuickMix playlist. QuickMix is temporary playlist that plays in an imeem pop-up window. Add songs to the QuickMix as you browse around, then just save your selections as a playlist when you're done. You can also make Quick playlists of your searches, which let you actually listen or watch your search results. All songs include icons that let you embed them in social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and popular blogging services such as Blogger and LiveJournal. All genres of music are represented on imeem, although hip-hop and indie rock seem the most popular. Most of the videos are music videos, but you'll still find much of the same interesting or goofy content you'd see on YouTube or Break.com. If you plan on using your profile to promote your music or films, you can join imeem as a musician or director. The service offers a content tracker that lets musicians and directors check the stats on media that they're showing on imeem. I'd definitely give imeem the nod over the other social music sites I've seen recently. Imeem does everything that MOG or Last.FM does, but with a cleaner interface, easier listening options, and the freedom to fast-forward and create custom playlist from over 3 million full-length tracks. My only complaint is imeem's lack of an advanced search feature. With so many songs featured on the service, it would help to be able to narrow your search by artist, album, or genre and not just keywords. But this isn't a major annoyance. The site is already impressive and will only get better once more major labels sign up, giving users even more full-length songs they can enjoy guilt-free—without spending a dime.
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