MySpace Looking to Purchase imeem

Rupert Murdoch’s bleeding social networking site, MySpace, is making some drastic moves to eek a profit out of a Facebook/Twitter-dominated industry, one of them a possible pay model to earn back some of the $20 million the site spends on streaming royalties every month. Next could be the acquisition of free-streaming music site imeem.

The purchase would come just months after MySpace bought the similarly titled iLike, though its benefits are a bit hazy at the moment. imeem is now experiencing some financial woes of its own while dipping in and out of debt. The company has bought itself a few more months to stay afloat, but investors have grown unwilling to pour more capital into the faltering company, according to TechCrunch.com.

The two guarantees MySpace has in buying imeem are a veteran staff of digital music techies, and the intellectual property for SNOCAP, the Shawn Fanning-founded digital music wholesaler that tracks the number of times a particular song is downloaded.

The acquisition doesn’t seem like much for now, but it could be the beginning of the end for finding free music online. iLike and imeem are some of the last non-pay services available. If MySpace finalizes a pay model for its profiles, it could be tough to find free-streaming tunes on the web.

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