Posts Tagged ‘per-stream-fees’
Warner Music Says Imeem Is Worthless, And Owes It $4 Million Which It Can’t Collect
How bad are things getting for music streaming startups? We knew that imeem was on the verge of shutting down before getting a last-minute cash infusion from some of its investors, but an SEC filing from Warner Music adds some more details about exactly how dire imeem’s situation is, as well as that of another music startup, Lala.
Warner Music Group, an investor in both imeem and Lala, thinks they are no longer worth much, if anything at all. It wrote down its entire investment in imeem and half of its investment in Lala in the most recent quarter. As detailed in its 10Q report filed with the SEC, it took a $16 million charge to write down its investment in imeem, and an $11 million charge to write down part of its investment in Lala, plus it took another $4 million charge to write down a bad debt from imeem which it never expects to collect. That comes to a total of $33 million down the digital music drain.
The reason imeem is in such dire financial straits is because of the crushing payments to music labels it has to dole out for every song streamed from its site. It has renegotiated its deals with the labels to pay on a revenue-per-user basis instead of per stream, and Warner’s filing hints at why it had to do so. It appears that imeem had simply stopped paying those per-stream fees, which would explain the $4 million in bad debt. And that was just for one quarter for one label. No wonder imeem nearly ran out of cash. It had to stop paying its bills.
According to comScore, imeem’s U.S. traffic has come down about 25 percent off its peak last July. As of March, 2009 it was at 5.3 million unique visitors in the U.S. and 24 million worldwide. In the perverse world of music streaming licensing, the bigger your audience, the more money you lose.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Brilliant New API Startup Generates 1,000s Of Videos On The Fly
Stupeflix is a French startup which has come up with a radically new way of creating, processing and editing online video. On the face of it, Stupeflix automatically generates professional looking videos out of pictures, music and videos. If that sounds like Animoto, then you are right, but there are key differences under the hood which make Stupeflix totally different and potentially of much greater value. And I don’t say that lightly.
Where Animoto and Stupeflix completely diverge is in their approach and business model. Stupeflix has effectively come up with an API which describes video, text, using and pictures in flash video based on an XML description. So instead of actually editing the video you edit the XML. That means you can edit video just by changing a tag, or by telling their engine to run a different kind of effect for every video you wants to generate. iMovie would create just one video, and requires a meaty package to edit how it’s presented. With Stupeflix you just edit the XML, with tags like “rotate” or “fade left”. Today Stupeflix launches the web interface to its video editing web application and as a demonstration they’ve generated over 1,000 videos direct from Wikipedia content, automatically, in under 60 minutes.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0