MySpace "Migrates" imeem Into Nothing

If you’ve ever launched a website you know that before launching, you set up a staging environment to ensure that it’s going to function properly when it goes live. If you work within the digital department of a large corporation, you should definitely know that the process for transitioning a site involves testing it first. MySpace however has redirected the entire imeem site to a page which says “MySpace is working to migrate your imeem playlist to MySpace Music. We’ll email you about that once we have more details.” Really?

The main reason that this transition was an absolute disaster is that they essentially killed a community. Perhaps MySpace wanted to kill their competition for under a reported $1 million. However they didn’t convert the biggest asset of the company: the community. Now all the artists will end up on a page which tells them that they should signup for MySpace Music, and users are told to standby until they get an email.

Owen Van Natta wrote to the following earlier today:

In the coming weeks, our team will be working to take the aspects of imeem that users love and migrate them to MySpace Music. We’ll start that transition today by redirecting imeem users to MySpace Music to discover their favorite music.

So if MySpace is working on it, why would they start off by killing the entire site? It makes absolutely no sense at all. There are only a few logical explanations: MySpace wanted the technology behind imeem, MySpace wanted to kill imeem, or they wanted a quick way to promote MySpace music. While a $1 million acquisition probably isn’t the biggest issue facing MySpace (they have some other announcements tomorrow), throwing away new acquisitions in the toilet probably doesn’t make much sense though.

Perhaps they’ll be able to migrate the imeem community however this doesn’t appear to be a great start.

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