At midnight, MySpace Music was launched, which is said to be the most significant challenge to Apple for some time. This venture was previously reported on by bigmouthmedia at the start of September and is aiming towards being one of the biggest digital music stores online today.MySpace has long been known for its musical connections, with small bands and clubs creating profiles to promote themselves online. Even popular bands, already doing well in the market, have used MySpace to promote new singles and albums to the socialising web. Now, their material can be sold through the same network, making this type of promotion even more valuable.
One of the unique aspects of this new music service is that they are giving on demand streaming away free, an inconceivable project a few years ago. It is still slightly unclear how the music labels benefit from this arrangement, but one thought is that their confidence in the process boosting sales online outweighs worries about streaming costs. It has also been reported that major labels have equity stakes and that advertising revenue will be split among the joint venture partners according to the size of those stakes.
Not only is this a good opportunity for the music industry to increase in online sales, but the streaming will be advertising supported, initially via display ads, and later via in-stream audio ads. Since social networks are increasingly popular at the moment, this is a key area for online advertising while it's still fresh.
An added bonus of this new music feature is that tracks that are downloaded and paid for, via Amazon's music download service are DRM free and in the versatile MP3 format, meaning no restrictions on the user.
Another useful feature for users is the ability to create playlists that contain up to 100 of their favourite songs and share them with other friends. Not only that, but downloaded songs can also be madeb available as ringtones via Jamster. MySpace itself will promote popular playlists and will create its own top 100 lists in various ways, so each user can have personalised recommendations from their friends.
All of this is very interesting, but as there are already tens of millions of non-U.S users, it's surprising that MySpace didn't secure more countries before launch. Only the U.S will be able to use this new service and this is down to the different licensing deals in each country.
MySpace went on to say that "These international deals are extremely complicated" but will have music available on a country-by-country basis in the near future.
