imeem – Music is Social

If there’s one thing we love above all else at imeem, it’s music playlists. Not only do we obsessively make our own for every occasion, we love discovering new music on other people’s carefully handcrafted playlists.

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!

You may have been wondering about this mysterious icon that now appears on music playlists, song pages, and search results. Well, wonder no more. In addition to creating playlists, you can now create something we like to call QuickMix. What exactly is a QuickMix? Think of it as a temporary  music playlist that you can listen to and add songs to “on-the-fly” while browsing around imeem.

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.

One of my favorite things on imeem is being able to create a playlist of any of the songs on the site so that all through the work day I can listen to my favorite tunes. Not too long ago the ability to “Feature” a playlist on your profile was added to show of their latest mixes. Last night we added the ability to feature any playlist on group profiles as well. This option is only available if you have created groups yourself, otherwise it works just like it always has in the past.

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!