According to CNET Spiralfrog has secured a loan extension after it was supposed to pay creditors $7 million by mid April, now it looks like it has another year to increase its revenues by a factor of 100 to even have a chance of paying its way out of the financial hole it's in. One of the interesting things about spiralfrog is that the investor agreements forced the company to be very public with its finances so unlike other free music sites we know that in the previous quarter they burned through $3.4 million and took in revenues of $20,400.

So at that rate it's not unreasonable to think they're going to owe a lot more by the time the loans come due.

I read that imeem has some strong ties to the original napster p2p service, apparently some of the engineers used to work there and now they've bought Snocap they've likely consolidated their army of ex-napster employeed who had scattered to new jobs when the company was finally sued out of existence. After reading this I got to thinking about the differences between imeem and napster and what makes them better.

Reasons why imeem is better
1) imeem runs from a web browser, napster needed you to download and install software.
2) because of this napster never ran on the mac, linux or any OS's other than windows
3) imeem hosts the mp3s, napster was p2p, which means you might find something but not be able to download it because the user was offline,
4) or your network and firewall wasn't set up properly
5) imeem is instant, with napster you had no idea how long it would take to get a track
6) and when you got it it might turn out to be a fake track created by agents of the RIAA
7) when napster got sued, it fought in court and eventually got shut down, imeem got sued and then signed a deal
8) imeem is a great way to find new artists and tracks, napster was only good for finding things you already knew about.
9) if you find something cool on imeem you can link to it or embed it in your web page, with napster you could only tell people the filename.
10) imeem lets you collect awesum toons into playlists, napster didn't do playlists
11) imeem lets you share videos too, napster only let you share videos by using third party hacks to make videos look like mp3s
12) imeem lets you share photos
13) imeem lets you blog about the awesome music
14) imeem has polls and battles too
15) imeem has a proper mail system, napster had an IM system which never worked for me.

Reasons why people might think napster was better but really it wasn't
16) you could download tracks from napster instead of just streaming them. Ahh now after all those attacks napster might come back with the big one to win the game. But napster ran from 1999 and shut down in July 2001, so downloading tunes from Napster to your iPod was as difficult as downloading tunes from imeem to your iPod. Because the iPod was launched in October 2001. Granted, some people probably burned tracks to CD, but truth be told most napster users simply listened to their downloads on their computer, just like you can with imeem.
17) Napster never forced your shared tracks to be 30 second previews! Absolutely true, but this is fended off by #7, I'd much rather have lots of full length tracks and the occasional 30 second track instead of "no tracks at all because the distribution system has been sued out of existence"
18) Napster has a cooler name and logo. But the great memories of that brand have been tarnished by Roxio and their Napster 2.0

So, napster wasn't that cool after all.

Which means no imeem on my iPhone - which is probably exactly what Apple wants, if you could listen to any music without going to ITMS then it would cut into their potential profits, and since all the iPhone plans include unlmited data it wouldn't be too profitable for the phone company either.
I've heard this phenomenon in the industry is referred to as revenue leak.

I can still go to youtube and watch 'videos' if I don't mind the shitty sound quality.

WTF are AOL thinking?

Worth a listen:

Fresh Air from WHYY, March 13, 2008 · Digital media — including MP3 players, peer-to-peer networks and music websites — are changing how we discover, listen to and share music. Writer Eliot Van Buskirk joins Fresh Air to discuss the new, digital landscape of music, and the resulting changes in the music industry.

Van Buskirk covers digital media for Wired.com on the blog, Listening Post. Formerly a senior editor for digital music and devices at CNET.com, he is the author of two books, Burning Down the House: Ripping, Recording, Remixing, and More! and iPod and iTunes QuickSteps.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88145070