MySpace Music Venture

Joshua writes about cool interesting stuff over on his own blog Extendably. Feel free to check it out, I’m sure you’ll like it.

No matter what your opinion is on MySpace, the announcement of the MySpace Music store and service is big news.

Perhaps the real question should be, “Why so long?” After all MySpace was the place to be  for Death metal bands and sincere singer/songwriters for the last 5 years. In fact it still is the place to be, however the quality of the MySpace music services has been really lagging when compared to other services.

The last year seems to have been spent with MySpace fixing up many of the issues which turned people off the service and onto Facebook. A more consistent, redesigned website, applications, MySpace IM, auto-playback of profile songs turned off by default and other annoyances.

Growth has still been flat now for the last 6 months and MySpace is the initiative News Corp hopes will bring MySpace back into the spotlight and boost revenues.

MySpace Music is a joint venture between MySpace, Amazon and the three major music labels; Sony, Universal and Warner Music. Essentially music will be offered for unlimited free streaming and will the service will introduce new social features for music sharing such as features borrowed from Muxtape (shut down by the RIAA) and playlist creation and sharing.

For song downloads music can be bought through Amazon’s music service which provides DRM free music downloads, although only to America at the moment, I don’t know if this will change with the launch.

The service will be very prominently sponsored by huge companies such as Toyota, McDonalds and State Farm.

Whatever your opinion of MySpace is (and my own isn’t that favourable) this launch is very significant. It goes a long way towards providing users with music discovery and streaming tools, it gives greater exposure for  Amazon’s mp3 download service which in turn will perhaps provide some decent competition to iTunes. It may also turn around MySpace’s lagging growth and provide some decent competition to Facebook’s seemingly unstoppable growth.

I’m watching with interest.