Universal Joins Forces With Social Networking Site

The Wall Street Journal reports that Universal Music has joined forces with social networking service Imeem, Inc. The licensing agreement will allow Imeem's 19 million users to listen to, and embed, Universal music & videos for free on their personal pages. On Universal's end, it will receive a penny-rate payment each time a user listens to one of its songs in addition to sharing advertising revenue associate with a given song. The deal thus promises to provide labels "a revenue stream they've never seen before".

With this deal, Universal joins the other major label groups and marks the first of its kind to cover all four majors. Notably, Universal has a rough-history in such deals - it sued MySpace.com last year for copyright infringement, alleging that the site didn't do enough to prevent users from posting copyrighted materials without authorization.