I’m kind of feeling Tabi Bonney. I listened to "Beat Rock" while I was watching Keys 2 The City, which is this webisode thing on imeem, which I would totally embed on here if our blog site wasn’t being such a bitch right now. For now, go to one of my favorite other blog sites, Nah Right, and check it out or here’s the imeem direct link. Wale introduces you to the D.C. rap scene and a couple of friends of his, Tabi being one of them. I can’t get the "ha ha ha ha" out of my head from "Beat Rock". It’s good shit.

With the announcement that iTunes has become the #1 retailer of music in the USA and MySpace announcing its own online music store, the fact that anybody wants to buy Snocap is bewildering. But as announced earlier today, Imeem just bought the struggling digital music service company.

From Billboard:

Imeem itself is a customer of the service, using Snocap to identify tracks uploaded to the Imeem service by users to ensure content owners have allowed the full streaming of their music, as well as manage the ad-share revenue payments back to the appropriate label and artist each time a registered song is played via Imeem. Other customers include MySpace, which uses Snocap’s MyStores widget to let independent and unsigned artists sell individual tracks to fans via MySpace profiles.

Snocap has been struggling over the past year and was actively seeking a buyer. Although the registry contains more than 7 million tracks from all major labels, few services use the database and those that do are relatively minor in comparison to the market-leading iTunes music store. The once-hyped Mashboxx P2P service was supposed to be Snocap’s coming out party three years ago, but that service never launch, and likely never will.

The MyStores widget, meanwhile, never caught fire with the robust MySpace artist community. Many artists complained Snocap charged excessive per-track fees, which led to high-priced downloads to fans and leaving little left for the artist.

I mean, Snocap looked kinda cool on paper (or on screen, rather) — little independent bands could host a widget directly on their MySpace and fans could buy MP3s…but the service was only free to bands for the first year, and Snocap took a healthy percent of the sales, and I’m pretty the bands were obligated to stay on for another two years and pay Snocap for the privilege of gouging them…that’s why I never signed up for that shit. I call BULLSHIT on the Snocap model. Now it’s in Imeem’s court. Lemme know how that works out for ya…

Two stupidly named Internet companies that offer services that other companies do better and that no one really wants anyway, Imeem and Snocap, joined forces today in the desperate hope that someday a real company will buy them out and shower them with gold and wealth. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but are rumored to be in the low two figures. And that’s including cents.

Universal Music has signed a deal to make their music available to Imeem users. With the signing of the deal, Imeem now has partnerships with all four major labels, including Warner Brothers, EMI and Sony BMG.

Imeem users can stream songs in full from partner-labels, who get a cut thanks to advertising. As of now, Imeem gains an edge over competitor MySpace because Universal allows only for the streaming of 90-second clips to members of that online social network.

Universal Music Chair and Chief Executive Doug Morris explains the reasons for treating the two sites differently as follows:

“Imeem has developed an innovative way to make our artists’ music a central part of the social-networking experience,” Morris said. “More importantly, they’ve done so the right way–by working with [Universal] to provide an exciting musical experience for consumers, while ensuring that our artists are fairly compensated for the use of their works.”