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MySpace-Imeem Deal Leaves Indie Artists Unpaid
azoblue writes with news that following MySpace's acquisition and shutdown of imeem, independent artists who sold their music through imeem's Snocap music storefronts (on MySpace and other sites) won't be paid what's owed them. More than 110,000 artists are believed to be affected. The crux of the problem is that MySpace acquired only a certain portion of the assets that were imeem — "the domain name and certain technology and trademarks" — and not imeem’s outstanding debts, including the money imeem owed to artists under the Snocap relationship. According to the article, some artists have been owed money for more than a year. "Napster creator Shawn Fanning co-founded Snocap in 2002 to let artists sell their music through an embeddable storefront widget. At one point, the service was marketed as the exclusive way for artists to sell music on MySpace. Imeem bought Snocap last summer. But because MySpace left most aspects of Snocap out of its acquisition of imeem’s assets, all 110,000 or so of those storefronts are gone. The server that hosts them is offline and so is the Snocap website."
Everyone said it was just the nature of the old media moguls to steal the money from the artists. The new Napsterites were supposed to be purer and they would never do anything bad to the artists. But maybe this was just camouflage for their anarchy. Bummer...
I've been through asset both buying and selling. It will be hard for MySpace to pull this off as the courts may not see the sale as a pure asset sale. It's one thing when you sell buildings and plant equipment. It's quite another when you sell the essence of the business: the brand, key employees and the customers and vendor relationships (musicians). Unfortunately, because this likely will be a class action, the musicians will be screwed a second time when the lawyers swoop in and get 40-60% of the settlement.
Time to cue up "That old class action" by Dewey, Cheatham & Howe.
-- $G
...that is, France, I believe this kind of scam is downright illegal, and specialized courts that deal with commerce do frown upon selling assets and leaving the debt to a straw company. They are usually declared de facto bound to one another and treated as one entity. But then again, IANAL. Sounds reasonable though.
OK, so I'm an "indie" artist, and I have a ton of friends who are indie artists as well. We actually just got signed to a minor record label after years of trying to sell our CDs at gigs, carshows, and chick-fil-a grand opentings, etc. Fortunately, we used iTunes to sell our music instead of imeem. I have to tell you that at .99$ a tune we weren't making a whole lot of $$. In fact, all of my indie friends mentioned above pretty much have full time jobs to pay the bills - the music thing for most of us is something we do just because we love to play.
The point is that I would guess that the imeem accounts are probably just micropayments - maybe in the range of 5-20$. I wouldn't expect any laywer to go after this kind of chump change, not even for a class action suit. I think us poor starving musician types will just have to suck it up as usual while we get hassled by the man.
Actually paid == payed. Payed is an archaic form of paid, which is obsolete in most circumstances. Apparently it's still correct in the nautical use as well as for payed subscriptions. Hell even the spell check in Firefox accepts it as legimit.
If you're going to be one of those annoying grammar nazi pricks, the least you could do is be right.
Exactly. This is what happened when the computer book publisher glasshaus (Wrox, Friends Of Ed) went down. They pulled the classy stunt of locking the door on the quarterly payday just to maximize what they owed authors and give the authors minimum forewarning on paying their own bills. And the authors never got a dime after -- the "artists", the term RIAA etc like to fling around to mean the musicians and writers, always get paid last. Which means never in any sort of meltdown. That's how publishing is structured, and why it's total bullshit when these outfits claim they are protecting artists' rights.
(Posting AC because I still have a couple of active contracts, and if you look at any contract you'll see the author can never say anything mean or simply less than positive about publishers or the work. And legal threats aside, it's alway my-dog-ate-it tooth-pulling to find out where the late cheque is every quarter. I don't care to make that more work than it already is.)