Myspace Music opened today, with major ad sponsorships that will give us some free album downloads, playlists and other new features. The service offers MySpace's 120 million users music streaming, and the ability to add an entire playlist of songs to their profiles, instead of the current single song, MSM will provide links to purchase DRM-free tracks. It's a complete revamp of the music section of the social network site which brings many elements of the music biz together. To keep the major labels happy, MySpace created a joint venture to oversee their music initiative, which is in part owned by the four major record labels (around 40% label owned). While Universal Music Group, Sony/BMG, and Warner Music Group were known to be involved for awhile now, EMI Music Group just joined the venture recently, supposedly on the eve of the service's launch. There is though, a controversy over the lack of independent labels or digital aggregators was developing, MySpace unveiled licensing deals with the Orchard, and independent distribution groups as ADA, Red, Fontana and Caroline.
Other MySpace Music features available at launch:
-When any MySpace member add music to their playlist, their entire friends list is informed thru the “Friend Updates” feature, which contains a link to the song added.
-Fans can post up to ten songs from their profile for others to stream when visiting, and up to 100 songs for their own personal enjoyment via a playlist function.
-Wherever a song link appears on the service, there's also an “add” button that allows members to add the song to their playlists, as well as a “buy” button to purchase and download the song via retail partner Amazon.com. Additionally, members can search for ringtones available via MySpace sister company Jamster (Fox Interactive Media owns both companies).
The MySpace Music homepage has also been revamped, including a more interesting “featured artists” section and the addition of a celebrity playlist section. Other features to be added at some point later include- more retail shopping functions (concert tickets and artist merchandise), more content
(only music from artists on UniMusGrp, Sony BMG and WMG is available), friends music recommendations, syndication abilities (playlists created on member profiles are limited to those profiles only, users can’t post their playlists to other blogs or websites) However, MySpace representatives stress that it will upgrade the music service with these and other features over the course of the next year.
Check it out and let us know what you think... Will it change social networking, the music biz and downloading???
UPDATE - 9/26/08- After independent record labels including Merlin and A2IM criticized MySpace for not offering them a similar deals in he new MySpace Music joint venture with the major record labels, MySpace responded in a statement saying it offered all labels the same deal. See report on DMW, here
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