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Category: Music
Developer: iMeem
Minimum Requirements: iPhone OS 3.0
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch
File Size: 0.6 MB
Price: Free
Availability: Now
Version Reviewed: 2.0.1

I really can’t figure out why iMeem hasn’t been sued into oblivion. The website allows registered users to upload their music, and other registered users to listen to the whole song. Sure, they offer links to buy the songs from iTunes or other services, and if you’re not registered (which is free), you can only hear a 30 second sample of songs. Still, it is essentially a streaming music service you don’t have to pay for.

iMeem Mobile for iPhone and iPod touch is not the same thing: for one thing, you’re limited in what you’re allowed to search for from other users. It’s more like Pandora radio, where you can choose a band (rather than, say, a specific song like you can on the iMeem site), and it’ll pick a random song by that band as well as songs by artists like that group. You can skip past songs you don’t like (“A Wonderful Christmastime?” No, thanks.), but you only get six skips an hour. If you’re in the mood for that, it does feature some of iMeem’s more weird and obscure songs, like, say, Peter Sellers singing “Hard Day’s Night” as if he was Laurence Olivier in Richard III.

iMeem mobile has several “featured stations,” which are your typical fare: Spotlight of new and notable artists, the weekly Top 100, and Summertime Jams, which for me misses the entire point of iMeem—pushing stuff you could find on FM radio rather than user playlists.

One nice feature is that you have complete access to the music you upload to iMeem: up to 20,000 songs, they say. Great news for my 8GB iPod touch which is full of video and applications. Big problem: you can’t organize your music into playlists. Also, since it’s a streaming app, if you need to do anything else on your iPhone/iPod, leaving the app causes the music to stop. Also, this is ad-supported software of the most obnoxious sort: not only does Dr. Pepper have its own unbelievably-David-Naughton-free station, but ads for it pop up over every song.

As a streaming music app, iMeem mobile is fine for finding music that someone else thinks goes well together. If you’re willing to take the time to upload your music to their service, you can have a not-incredibly-convenient method of listening to it (but not to your playlists) whenever you have a net connection. But the real killer feature of iMeem—having access not to just your music collection but to everybody’s music collection—is sadly absent.