MySpace Replaces All iMeem Playlists With Ads -- Doesn't Ask Permission
from the is-that-legal? dept
With MySpace buying up some of iMeem's assets (and leaving many musicians with little hope of getting paid what they're owed), one of the big complaints was that all of iMeem's public playlists simply disappeared overnight. This was particularly obnoxious, because plenty of people had relied on iMeem for legal music streaming of playlists they had put together. It appears that last week MySpace decided to add insult to injury and quietly started replacing all iMeem playlists with giant ads. I just checked the one iMeem playlist I had created on a different blog, and, sure enough, in its place was a giant flash ad for Beyonce ringtones.This should be a warning for anyone using any third party widget maker for placing content on your site. You're basically giving others control over what they display on your site, but it's particularly obnoxious to replace something like a music playlist with an advertisement. Many sites that included iMeem playlists were non-commercial, and sneaking ads into them could potentially impact other issues. As we were recently discussing, Vimeo says that you can't post its videos to sites with ads (even though it seems to ignore most people who do). But what if you had Vimeo videos on a site that also had an iMeem playlist? Suddenly that site has "gone commercial" with ads, even though the owner of the site might not even realize it.
As many people are claiming that streaming services like Spotify and the now-Apple-owned Lala are "the future of music," including their ability to post streamable playlists, it's worth remembering what happened in this instance. It's certainly making me think twice about ever using a third party app for streaming content, knowing that they might just replace it with an ad down the road.
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Filed Under: ads, embedded music, music streaming, playlists, third party apps
Companies: imeem, myspace
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Hows it go...
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"Gone Commercial"
IMHO, someone like Google / AdSense would probably have a bigger problem with this because MySpace's ads are now directly competing with Google's ads on the same page.
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Re:
It's actually an issue with third-party cross-site content sharing. It has almost nothing to do with "Cloud Computing". A complete misuse of buzz words.
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Re: Hows it go...
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I smell a class action lawsuit
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rented music
i worry that the gen-z-ers will just come to expect this behavior from their media overlords, just as my generation had to come to terms with seeing nothing but "the real world" on mtv. the real young ones won't even know what hit 'em, because they won't know any better.
even if it's free, once it's mine, you can't have it (or even buy it) back. people have given me cds too, but the record companies can't delete them just because i didn't purchase license any more.
the cloud has it's benefits, everyone is beginning to see this, but i think it's still a good idea to have a backup plan (physical media). convenience-vs-conviction, it's slighly analogous the the "freedom-vs-security" comprimise.
the only solution is to host your own content, but that's not so easy. i guess "you get what you pay for" holds true here.
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Re: I smell a class action lawsuit
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Huh?
Good grief.
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Myspace is over
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Yeah - but oddly, I can't see how chasing off customers = more revenue..
Maybe it's just me..
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Browser
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Re: Re: Hows it go...
I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic.
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