My first post on imeem, not so good. First, more commentary, including a useful quote:

“Consumers love the idea of free music downloads, but I think it will be very difficult to underwrite that completely with advertising,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.

It’s possible, he continued, that sites like Spiral Frog would have enough page views to generate revenue to compensate record companies for the lost revenue from sales. But he said he hasn’t seen numbers to prove it.

The imeem model, though, makes better financial sense for record companies, he said. “If you can’t download the music to your hard drive and you can’t put it on your iPod, then it’s basically Internet radio,” he added. “That model makes a lot of sense because most people aren’t going to pay to access music without being able to download it,” Sterling said.

Sterling concluded by saying that “music stores are trying to do iTunes one better, but it’s difficult to compensate for lost sales through advertising if people can download the tracks.”

What he said. imeem as replacement internet radio. The recent hike to royalty rates for internet radio forced most of those stations to close.

A music distribution channel cannot “do iTunes one better” unless it provides seamless portability and cheap(er) content. Perhaps what the labels want is to recreate radio on both the internet and portable music players. Perhaps revenues could be generated by audio or text ads as appropriate. First, though, kill old radio.

Royalties, ad revenues, purchases, subscription fees, etc., are due to copyright holders. Appropriately so. Even if the labels do nothing to further promote or distribute music, they are still due the economic opportunity embodied by the copyright.

If a different copyright model emerges, then the true death rattle of record labels could commence. Until the moment, I have to remind myself: Hate the player, not the game.