We have seen the music industry turn itself upside down and inside out since Napster first undermined their business model. Now we have the latest twist as MySpace prepares to launch MySpaceMusic, a joint venture with the unlikely grouping of News Corp., Warner Sony BMG and Universal Music Group. They have opted for the increasingly popular advertising model plus selling digital downloads of music through a partnership with Amazon.com. An interesting group, that of the major record producers, only misses EMI. However, the smell of money has attracted the likes of Sony Pictures, McDonalds, State Farm and Toyota will be among the first sponsors of the site.
The Music companies hope that the service will weaken Apple’s market dominance and although it would appear everyone is backing it they are also backing everything else!
So what will be different? It will not be the only service to have a significant catalogue of millions of songs. It won’t be the only service to enable users to create their own playlists. Perhaps it is the only one which enables users to post one of those playlists, with 10 songs, to their public MySpace profiles, where their friends can listen and save those songs to their own pages. But is that enough? To transfer music to another computer or a mobile device users have to buy songs on the site through Amazon’s digital music store. Mobile ring tones will have to be bought News Coproration’s Jamster. So is it enough and why not go direct Amazon or Jamster?
Where it may gain traction is in the fact that it is estimated that around five million artists use MySpace to interact with fans. MySpace Music will enable them to post their entire catalogues and share in the resulting advertising and download revenue. MySpace is reported as saying that it may allow artists to sell merchandise and concert tickets from their pages and keep a share in the profit.
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