There needs to be a self-hosted platform for this hooked up directly to the artist's bank account. It's ridiculous to implement the middle man that is a digital program instead of a retarded record exec. Zed Shaw has talked about this a tiny bit. I've thought about taking over the defunct open source OpenTape project which was born out of Muxtape's demise. Add in a simple payment engine for songs (hook up to your paypal, bank account via amazon,etc.), along with making the flash widget nicer with links to download. Make it completely open source. If an artist doesn't want to deal with the tech, charge for the self hosted version, and let them keep 100% of revenues after payment processing.
That deal just looks iffy. A sub-million dollar takeover for a site with 16 million active users ? - at a few cents per user there should have been a good half-dozen competitors willing to purchase. But it ended up having assets sold below market value to a group part owned by one of the current owners. That seems the kind of activity that would get you on the receiving end of a fraud investigation.
With a business model that is dependent on licensing content from organizations like the RIAA, I think it came down to liabilities and licensing costs more than anything else.
Don't under-estimate the cost of running a music streaming site. With non-indie content, it's very expensive.
Well, you still need to take its debt into account as well, which I'm assuming Imeem has quite a bit if it sold for so low with 16 million users. A company with $10M in debt, for instance, that's purchased for $2, is really a $12M acquisition.
It was an asset purchase, not an acquisition, so the debt stayed behind.
Ouch. That really sucks, because without assets there's no way to pay off that debt. Unless of course they can just file for Chapter 11? I don't know much about finance, but if they can, that would be really, really cheap!