
MySpace/Imeem Deal Leaves Thousands of Artists Unpaid - Shamiq
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/myspace-imeem-deal/
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jasonlbaptiste
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.

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ig1
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.

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tree5
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.

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sachinag
It was an asset purchase, not an acquisition, so the debt stayed behind.

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ComputerGuru
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!

