Business Issues Blog

Update: MySpace has sent an email around to imeem users giving them an update about playlists. The MySpace Music team is working around the clock to duplicate your imeem playlists and make them available to you on myspacemusic.com as soon as possible. In the coming weeks, we will be emailing you with instructions on how to claim your playlists on MySpace Music, using your MySpace login. If you don’t have a MySpace account you can sign up for one here . If you have questions about MySpace, please visit http://faq.myspace.com/app/home . ( Via HypeBot ) Original Article:

Pepsi will reportedly be skipping its annual Super Bowl commercials, and will instead invest the money it would generally spend on those, in social media marketing. This would make the first time in 23 years that Pepsi will not have Super Bowl ads. Larry D. Woodard, President and CEO of Manhattan ad agency Vigilante writes in an ABC News piece: Pepsi represents one of the stalwarts, not just of the Super Bowl advertiser lineup, but of broadcast TV in general. In 2006, spending on brand, Pepsi was at about $150 million. Although brand spending has been decreasing in recent years, Pepsi has continued to spend tens of millions on TV. And the Super Bowl annually has the largest audience of any TV show. As television viewership has gone down, Internet usage, particularly social media interaction, has increased. The 2009 Super Bowl attracted an impressive 95.4 million viewers (approximately 42.1 percent of U.S. TV homes) and many of those watch the commercials as attentively as the football game. By contrast, in the important 18-34 demographic, a whopping 85 percent use social media (texting, blogging or social networking), and the phenomenal growth of social media has the attention of every major company. This holiday season, Toys “R” Us developed a Facebook page that grew at the astounding rate of between 40,000 and 95,000 fans per day after its late November launch. As the numbers Woodard mentions would indicate, the Super Bowl is always an advertiser’s dream. It costs big bucks, but there are so many eyeballs on those ads, and some people even watch the event just to see the commercials. Pepsi’s move really says something about how far social media has come in the advertising world in such a short time. The fact that the company is breaking such a long-standing tradition in favor of it says a lot. Of course social media will play its role in the further viewing of the Super Bowl ads themselves. They will no doubt appear on various video sites, and will be shared by countless people on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

Earlier this year, we spoke with Lime Wire CEO George Searle about the music industry and the company’s future, as it offers one of the most widely used file sharing services. Now we have engaged in a Q&A with Zeeshan Zaidi, who came to Lime Wire as the company’s Head of Global in July, with a background as a record label executive, a musician, and a lawyer. WebProNews: We’re told the LimeWire software has been translated into Arabic and will soon be translated into Persian, while the software and website are translated into a total of 23 languages. How are languages chosen and what does this means for the global peer to peer community?

MySpace announced today that it has completed a deal to acquire “certain assets” of the popular social media music service imeem. imeem is now redirecting to MySpace Music. “MySpace Music and imeem share a common vision and commitment to further enabling the socialization of content across the Web,” says MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. “This deal will allow us to leverage imeem’s industry leading technology and over time, meaningfully integrate their products into the MySpace Music experience.” “Since its inception in 2003, imeem has built a highly engaged music community of more than 16 million users worldwide,” says Van Natta. “imeem helped pioneer the ad-supported digital music model and created the Web’s first embeddable music and video playlists enabling users to embed songs and playlists virtually anywhere on the Web, including MySpace.” MySpace will be taking on imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, CTO Brian Berg, COO Ali Aydar and VP of Sales David Wade as consultants to help manage the transition. Financial terms were not made available in the announcement. Mike Arrington says it’s less than $1 million. MySpace says that in the coming weeks, they will be working as quickly as possible to take aspects of imeem and migrate them to MySpace Music. The company says they’ll be working to offer users the imeem playlists they created.

MySpace is continuing to make big strides on the music front.

The “virtual fifth label” is now friends with MySpace.  Merlin, an organization that represents independent music companies, is supposed to have signed a deal with the social network that should nicely complement MySpace’s existing partnerships with EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner. Merlin’s association with indie artists and late arrival to the music scene (it launched in

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MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label

NBC said today “The National Dog Presented by Purina” will be available online Thanksgiving Day (Noon – 2 p.m. in all time zones) at NBCSports.com. The television broadcast will also be available online after 2 p.m. ET on Hulu . To complement the TV special and showcase all the breeds, NBCSports.com will feature video of the walks, examination and judging of all the breed-winning dogs with commentary from announce Wayne Ferguson, President of the host Kennel Club of Philadelphia. NBC is inviting viewers to vote for their favorite group winner in a best in show poll. TV viewers will be able to vote online at NBCSports.com or by texting the word “DOG” to 5155 on their cell phones. “The success and popularity of the ‘National Dog Show’ is because it reaches all generations and families can watch the show together,” said Jon Miller, Executive Vice President of NBC. “There is also growing interest in all of the different breeds and we recognize the importance of providing online coverage of each one.” NBC says “The National Dog show” attracted 18.7 million viewers last year, and this year it will again follow the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The show is hosted by John O’Hurley and analyst David Frei.