MySpace Going One Way And It's ....

MySpace was the social network and then came along Facebook. Some would suggest Murdoch bought the wrong one, others that he bought the right one and that is why today its in different position.

It looks like MySpace has finally realised that it has lost the battle with Facebook and now seeks to reposition and redesign itself from the world's largest general-purpose social network to one focused at musicians and music lovers.

Artists with flare and some design can visually convey their personalities more on MySpace than through Facebook's corporate colour and presentation and as long as the artist is there the fans will be there too. Artists will get three choices of design; the old- MySpace design, a magazine-like format, or a video format with mobile versions to follow later this year.

Meanwhile, Facebook still has its growing user community which in true social trems creates even greter growth. So the question is whether musicians want to live in a ring fenced social network or project themselves to a bigger community. If the later then MySpace is going only one way and that isn’t up.

The interesting question is what MySpace will do with all the user information from those who drop of their new site?

MySpaceMusic Team a Formidable One

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.