There has been some confusion about what is and isn’t changing, and I want to make clear that you will ALWAYS be able to post a profile picture, and to customize your profile theme. You will also still be able to post photos in comments by using standard embed code from sites like Photobucket.

We are listening, and wanted to give you an update on what we can do in response to your feedback.

First, we are delaying the removal of imeem’s photo storage features until Wednesday, July 15th. This will give imeem users extra time to transition those photos to other services.

Second, we’ve gotten questions about why we’re not offering a way for people to download and save the videos they have previously uploaded to imeem. The bottom line is that imeem was created as a place to upload and stream content; the site wasn’t built to support re-downloading of content (music or video), and making that change now isn’t practical for a variety of reasons. Our hope is that most users kept original copies of the videos they uploaded to the site. Our plan is still to remove all user-uploaded videos this Tuesday, June 30th.

This video change applies only to videos uploaded by users. We will continue to be a great place to go for official music videos, and in fact, it will be easier to search for and find music videos as a result of this change. You will still be able to express yourself by featuring these videos on your profile, alongside your favorite songs and playlists.

If you are an artist or label and would like to digitally deliver your video and make it available as part of our library of official ingested content, please contact us at partners@imeem.com.

Finally, we’ve heard from some VIP subscribers with concerns about the upcoming changes. We are offering refunds to those VIP subscribers who are directly affected by the changes; affected subscribers can send an email to VIP-support@imeem.com requesting a refund. Note: This email support address is for VIP subscribers only non-subscribers can email their feedback to our standard support address, support@imeem.com.

Thanks to everyone for your feedback.

Dalton

I want to let people in the imeem community know about a few changes we’re making next week to simplify the site.

Starting next Tuesday, June 30th, we will no longer offer the imeem community the ability to access user-uploaded videos and photos. Any photos or videos that you have uploaded to your profile, or to groups you’re a member of, will be removed from imeem on the 30th. In preparation for next week’s changes, we’ve removed the option to upload photos or videos from our Web-based and desktop upload software.

We’re making these changes as part of an overall effort to simplify imeem so it’s cleaner and easier to navigate. This means enhancing imeem’s most popular social music features, and de-emphasizing some (like user-generated photos and videos) that are less popular, cost more to host & stream, or are of less interest to our advertisers. Simply put, there’s no ROI for us in UGV.

People come to imeem to enjoy music; we want to make it even easier for you to discover, buy & socialize around the music you love. Our recently revamped artist pages, which aggregate artists’ music and videos on a single page, and our new search page are just two examples of how we’re already refining the experience in direct response to feedback we’ve gotten from our community.

This doesn’t mean video is going away on imeem. You’ll still be able to watch thousands of music videos. And creating original video will continue to be a part of the services we offer for our advertisers.

One more thing: next week’s changes will not affect your profile pictures, or the MP3s you have uploaded to imeem – we will continue to give people the ability to upload and stream their music on imeem.

I realize that many of you may have questions about these changes. We’ve created a FAQ here to answer some of them, and have also set up a dedicated customer support forum where you can ask questions or share your concerns. We appreciate your support.

Dalton

These changes won’t impact the vast majority of the imeem community. You can still visit imeem.com to watch millions of videos, upload your own videos, make video playlists and share them with your friends on imeem.

We recognize that the new policy may change how some people in the community use and enjoy imeem. To those impacted, please bear with us and know that we’re making the changes in an effort to better serve the entire community and continue offering the world’s best social music experience.

That being said, what better way to end 2008 than with a Year End Playlist Extravaganza! imeem has created a single page where millions of fans can come together to enjoy and celebrate the best new songs and artists of 2008 at http://www.imeem.com/extravaganza.

To get started, we reached out far and wide to gather 2008 playlists from a cross-section of musicians, celebrities, blogs and magazines. Check out top picks from everyone from Jason Mraz, T-Pain and Jazmine Sullivan to The Onion AV Club, Playboy and Dale Earnhardt Jr. You can also find out what the imeem community was listening to this year. Explore playlists featuring the most popular songs of the year on imeem plus a breakdown of top 10 songs by city. Ever wonder what imeem users in LA listen to compared to fans in New York? Find out on the Extravaganza.

Once you find a favorite playlist, you can embed it on your social networking profiles on MySpace or Facebook, Twitter it, blog it and email it to your friends to help them discover new music.

Most importantly, we want to hear about your favorite songs from 2008. What was on your playlist in 2008? You hope you join the Extravaganza group and add your playlist to share with everyone else.

Happy holidays from imeem!

So what did we do? We scoured the Interwebs to research each candidate’s music taste. After finding interviews and articles from venerable magazines like Rolling Stone and Blender, we pieced together Obama and McCain’s top 10 favorite songs as told by the candidates themselves!

What can you do with my favorite prez candidate’s playlist? We thought it would be fun to put each candidate’s list of top 10 songs into an imeem playlist that you can not only listen to it as much as you want, but also share the playlist with friends in the imeem community and post it as a playlist widget in your favorite social network such as facebook, myspace, friendster, or Hi5. You can blog it. You can twitter it. Play it loud so people can hear it outside your window on the street.

So let everyone know if you think Obama or McCain has the best playlist as the election draws near, and help decide which candidate will rock the nation…

Click here to listen to Barack Obama’s Playlist

Click here to listen to John McCain’s Playlist

Want to put some crazy dance videos, your latest party mix, or some summer jams on your Facebook page? No problem. Once you’ve added the imeem app, there are a variety of ways to add content to your Facebook profile:

[if you're surfing imeem]
* On any music playlist, song, or video page on imeem, click the Facebook icon under the “Add To My” section. Then click the link “Add To Facebook Profile”
* Copy and paste the URL of any music playlist, song, or video into the imeem Facebook app

[if you're using the imeem Facebook app]
* Check out our listing of featured and top ranked content and easily add any of that media to your page
* View what imeem content your friends have added, and add that stuff to your own page (you can claim that you added it first)

As always, suggestions and comments are welcome (just add them as a comment to this blogpost). We’re still trying to figure out what other neat stuff we can do with this Facebook app, so stay tuned for further updates.

Here’s the link: http://apps.facebook.com/imeemfb/ . Tell your friends to add it as well! And if you’re having trouble figuring out what content to add to your Facebook profile, here are some suggestions to get you started!

…Angelo
…Playlist: Dim Mak Records Sampler [ Add ]

…Rosa
…Video: Paris in Jail – Music Video Parody [ Add ]

…Joe
…Song: Silversun Pickups – Lazy Eye [ Add ]

…jimmylin
…Playlist: the eclectic collection (sorry, gotta pimp out my own playlist) [ Add ]

…Brian
…Song: Apples in Stereo – Energy [ Add ]

…Gina
…Video: The Strokes – You Only Live Once [ Add ]

[On a side note, isn't it crazy how many new apps are popping up every day? Some are addictive (I could spend hours drawing masterpieces with the Graffiti app), some are a little odd ("Your friend has thrown a sheep at you"...huh?!?!), and some are random (anyone else get a message saying someone rated them on the Lamefactor scale?). Go figure.]

Today we launched a new program to share ad revenue with bands when you listen to their songs. We’re really happy we can offer a sustainable and fair way to get artists even more involved with our website and connect with fans. With the launch, the site doesn’t work exactly the way it was before, but it’s very much in line with the original intent and spirit of imeem.

Same as always, you can listen to all of the music you upload. When you get a 30 second clip on other profiles though, it means that the artist or record label has chosen not to permit full-length streaming of their songs. I’ll say that again: when you see a 30-second preview, it means someone said we can’t stream the whole song to you.

We care deeply about seeing artists compensated for their hard work and creativity, so we came up with a pretty cool system. The artists and labels that have opted-in to be a part of our system have full streams and earn money when people listen to their music. Think about how great that is… the more you listen to, share, and buy an artists music, the more money they make!

Other record labels and artists have chosen not to make their songs available. This is their right in the filtering system we setup, but we will continue to work _very_ hard and _very_ closely with them to bring more rich media to all of you. We think our model is a good one and will do everything we can to benefit our community by creating a great long-term business for artists, labels, and imeem.

We care about our community and think this is the right thing to do. If you don’t see your favorite artist on the site, contact them and tell them to be a part of imeem. I think if everyone took the time to contact artists by email or their myspace and told them how much you would like to see their music on imeem, it would make a big difference.

P.S. If you are an artist, be sure you opt-in and register your content to get paid

When you first click on the icon, it’ll open up your QuickMix in a brand new window. From that point forward, you can keep browsing around imeem and adding songs to this QuickMix. All the playlist features that you are already familiar with are there (enabling/disabling a track, shuffle mode, etc.), and you can remove songs from your QuickMix that you don’t like.

But let’s say you create this amazingly perfect QuickMix and you want to save it. No problem. Just click on the “Save” button and you will be able to save the playlist to your profile page. Piece of cake.

Creating a QuickMix is an easy way to just sit back and enjoy some tunes without much hassle. What’s great is that it can serve a variety of other purposes as well. Here are some scenarios I was able to come up with. If you think of any of your own, let me know.

The “Channel Surfing” method - You do a search, quickly add a ton of songs to your QuickMix, cycle through them just as quickly, and figure out which ones you like and dislike.
The “Big Night” method – You’ve got a big dinner date at your place and your date is about to arrive. Just fire up a few slow jams into your QuickMix, and you’re all ready for the evening. If things turn out well, save the QuickMix for future use.
The “High Fidelity” method – You’re checking out your friend’s cool playlist but realize that a few songs on the list prevent it from reaching a level of greatness. So you add the good songs to a QuickMix, fill in the gaps with the songs you think should be in there, and now you can compare with your friend whose list is superior.

So go ahead, check it out, and create a QuickMix. And of course, let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.

For more information about QuickMix, check out our FAQ page here.

why is this cool_important_significant? well, the partnership lets us make sure that we’re keeping users happy and content owners (and artists) happy.

as the community has grown on imeem, we’ve been working hard on ways to improve how users find and express themselves with each other through their musical, artistic, and pop-cultural tastes. at the same time, we’ve also been working hard to create a reliable system for content owners and artists to control the availability of their content and also make money off of it.

IMHO, the best way to accomplish that is to offer a share of our online ad revenue to content owners, while also making sure that users can buy downloads of music or video they discover through others on imeem. snocap’s id system and content registry, which btw includes almost all of the major and indie label music out there, allows us to do just that.

So after several months of working on this Snocap-enabled system, we are excited to get the word out today and get more labels and artists involved on imeem!

If you are unfamiliar with how to feature a playlist, here’s how:

1) Find a playlist you like on imeem (it can even be your own).
2) Click the Feature This Playlist link, located below the playlist:

3) If you have created groups on imeem a dialog will pop up asking you where you would like to put the playlist, otherwise, you’re done!

Enjoy!