iMesh

iMesh was sued by the RIAA in 2003, settled for $4.1 million, and then did what none of its rivals managed: it turned itself into a licensed service and kept operating for another twelve years. It became the third most popular music subscription service in the United States. In June 2016 it went offline overnight with no announcement.

Timeline [edit]

1999

1999 Launch

iMesh launches

A peer-to-peer client on its own centralised network.

2003

18 September 2003 Legal

The RIAA sues iMesh

The complaint alleges the service encourages copyright infringement.

2004

20 July 2004 Legal

$4.1 million settlement

Unusually, iMesh is allowed to keep operating, and starts filtering uploads.

2006

17 August 2006 Acquisition

BearShare returns as an iMesh client

The subsidiary MusicLab reskins iMesh under the BearShare name.

2013

September 2013 Incident

Roughly 50 million accounts breached

Email addresses, usernames and salted MD5 hashes are taken.

2016

9 June 2016 Shutdown

iMesh goes offline without notice

The homepage is replaced with a farewell and the subscriptions stop.

Key figures [edit]

Metric	Value	As of	Confidence
Registered accounts ▲	50 million	September 2013	Confirmed Accounts exposed in the 2013 breach, a floor on the registered total

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: iMesh went offline on 9 June 2016 with no prior notice. Its front page was replaced with "We are sad to inform you that iMesh is no longer available", and its support page blamed changes in the music industry.

Our analysis: iMesh is the counterexample to every other entry here. It settled, licensed its catalogue, filtered its uploads and became the first RIAA-approved peer-to-peer service. It still died, because a licensed download shop had nothing to offer once Spotify existed.

History [edit]

Surviving the settlement

iMesh appeared in 1999 as a fairly ordinary peer-to-peer client on its own centralised network. The RIAA sued on 18 September 2003. Ten months later, on 20 July 2004, iMesh settled for $4.1 million, and the terms were different from the ones that ended everyone else: iMesh was allowed to keep operating.

It used that permission properly. Uploads were screened with acoustic fingerprinting from Audible Magic so that unlicensed material could not be shared. Users in the United States and Canada paid a monthly subscription or 99 cents a track. By 2009 iMesh was the third most popular music subscription service in America, and it had become the first peer-to-peer service the RIAA was willing to endorse.

It also absorbed the wreckage of its competitors. When BearShare settled in 2006, its name, technology and user list went to MusicLab, an iMesh subsidiary, and returned as a reskinned iMesh client.

The breach

In September 2013 iMesh was hacked and roughly 50 million accounts were exposed: email addresses, IP addresses, usernames and salted MD5 password hashes. The data surfaced for sale on a dark web market in mid 2016, days after the service closed.

Leaving quietly

On 9 June 2016 iMesh stopped, without warning. The homepage read "We are sad to inform you that iMesh is no longer available". The support page said that due to changes in the music industry, iMesh would no longer be available for download and would no longer sell subscriptions or tracks. A Facebook post thanked everyone for listening and promised a next adventure that never arrived.

The comments underneath were not about music. They were from people who had used iMesh's social features for years and had just lost every way of contacting the friends they made there.

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Timeline [edit]

The site through time

Ownership [edit]