Many years ago, I remember reading Trey Anastasio from Phish saying, in an article about what MP3′s would mean to the music industry, that he felt sure that eventually, every song would have an advertisement attached to the end of it.
In an eerie case of artist meanderings on technology imitating reality, Trey Anastasio was correct: thanks to a new partnerships, users can hear music for free — with advertising attached. With 16 million users and ranked currently the #4 most popular entertainment-multimedia site in the United States, music social networking site imeem.com has partnered with Snocap to offer digital delivery of copyrighted music that can be shared between site members. The not-so-revolutionary idea has been bandied about for years, but imeem is putting it into practice, potentially to avoid having to pay damages to Warner Brothers — the company who last month sued them for copyright infringement.
It will be interesting and exciting to see the direction that this takes.
