The ambitious new MySpace Music joint venture will launch this evening at midnight PST at music.myspace.com. All four major labels - Universal, Warner, Sony and EMI - are on board (EMI was a last minute addition). Also joining the venture is The Orchard, an independent music distributor, and four major publishing companies. Basically, everyone who controls rights to music is part of the new venture.
MySpace Music allows users to stream virtually any song ever published for free. Users can also create playlists that contain up to 100 songs and share them with others. Any song can also be downloaded in non-DRM MP3 format, for a fee, from Amazon’s music download service. And if you want that song as a ringtone, you can get it as well via Jamster.
Song streaming is supported via advertising on the site, and major advertisers like McDonalds, Sony Pictures, State Farm and Toyota are already signed up.
The site isn’t live, but we’ve included a number of screenshots supplied by MySpace (and it looks like the leaked screen shots were real).
Music Discovery
This isn’t just streaming music on demand. The playlist functionality and sharing will let users discover new music as well from the 5 million artists (a mix of major, unknown, and indie acts) that populate MySpace Music.
MySpace will promote popular playlists from users and will also create their own Top 100 lists from all users as well as just your friends, coworkers, etc. So each user will have personalized music recommendations from their friends.
MySpace Music: So Awesome, It’s Illegal?
MySpace Music goes a long way towards music’s inevitable future where all recorded music will be free. They, along with services like iMeem, are now giving on demand streaming music at a zero price point to users, which was inconceivable even a couple of years ago.
But the joint venture also raises legal concerns because it isn’t clear how labels are being compensated. They clearly own stock in the new company, which may be valued as high as $2 billion already. But what isn’t known is if MySpace has a special deal with the labels that lets them avoid paying per-stream fees for songs like everyone else does. Companies like Rhapsody, Last.fm and iMeem pay a reported $.005 to $.01 per song stream. If MySpace is paying less than that, there may be antitrust and price discrimination concerns. MySpace won’t comment on their deals with labels, other than to say that they are paying for the music. More transparency would go a long way towards helping us understand if these deals are fair to the market in general. Without that information, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that the labels are in this for the stock value of the entity and are willing to burn other Internet players to give it a competitive advantage.
More screenshots below:
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Looks like MySpace is suddenly relevant again. I don’t know why gets the money out of the deal, but unlimited free streaming music is something that Facebook just can’t touch. Huzzah to MySpace for returning to its roots (the music playing on pages) without being annoying (the music _automatically_ playing on pages).
I regret deleting my myspace profile:(
Sweet! More choice and competition in the music space is always a good thing. iTunes could use a little competition. Huzzah indeed.
does myspace music allow independent artists to add their music? that’s what made myspace so important in music to begin with. who wants to make playlists and stream hannah montana and the jonas brothers over and over?
“all four major labels” is hardly even close to “virtually all music,” and i checked the orchard’s web site and their selection is not comprehensive at all.
Yes, Indies will def be allowed to add their music, sell their music, sell their concert tickets and merchandise etc. MySpace isn’t forgetting about it’s Indie roots with this new product. Indies will have the same experience as that of the mainstream artists.
That’s great then, I’m really excited
oh god, it’s like saying “all food is available” and only offering Burger King, McDs, KFC and Starbucks. This is a truly horrendous homogenisation of musical tastes.
To (mis)quote Bill HIcks: When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children?
Please tell me why will people stop stealing their music?
Please tell me why artists will want to trade their existing websites for ones that conform to sharty-ass MySpace standards?
That’s great and all - but 1. how are the indie and unsigned guys going to compete with the majors on the same site? 2. there’s already a service out there that does this, (www.madeloud.com) and I’m sure they’ll let artists keep more money then the greedy Murdoch owned myspace…
Anyone else here use madeloud? Do you know how they compare/what else is out there for unsigned bands?
Oh, yippie. So it’s myspace with streaming music. I can really not express how underwhelmed I am.
Get clue, free beats, free downloads. Plug the headphones into the PC at work. Open myspace and ROCK the world.
New girlfriend coming over for dinner, go to myspace, plug in some PC speakers, put on the sappy playlist your friend uses, little wine, some candlelight and even you could get some…well maybe…
This rocks. All they need to do is hook up with that new google phone.
Are you going to pay for itunes? This calls for a happy dance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic-A4VkGVO8
This is really good news coming from MySpace in a long time. Congrats!
Is this for internation users too? will it work for me in sweden?
International*
What do you think Mike? is this going to be enough to fight Apple and Facebook at the same time? It sounds like it does…What do you have to say?
Can users embed the streams and their playlist streams (concluding they allow for such) on other sites… like my blog?
Worked amazingly for Hulu … is MySPace Music truly revolutionizing things here like Hulu? Hope so…
No need for me to use Bit TOrrent and what not …now with Hulu and it’s ilk!
Hulu’s only got 2 of several studios as equity partners so the comparison is off…I suspect you’ll still be using bit torrent for a while…
Well you got Fox, Universal and Warner Bros.(the wb “Friends”) that can be embedded throughout the Internet.
The industry needs to create their Hulu (audio ads after a few tracks) and allow music startups to innovate and get them in businesses they have never imagined. The startups that utilize their content would pay also…
Surprised they have not done this yet… definitely would solve their Apple issue and many of other issues, like the need to utilize Bit Torrent and it’s ilk.
wow so it’s like MySpace vs. Apple / FaceBook …
This is the offering as imeem, who is the largest music streaming in the world. Probably MySpace will take the lead now. They should both go now for Mobile, although I suspect that licensing does not include CellPhones. In any case, labels will have to lower prices by an order of magnitude to let this guys make money. That’s not going to happen in the short term.
Game on! Between this and the new self-serve Advertising platform, MySpace might just stop the bleeding. I’ve been a member since 2003 and this is definitely exciting news! This is one to watch for sure.
15 year olds everywhere, rejoice!
For me, time to keep enjoying Pandora radio. I have iTunes for playlists and music content, Pandora is where I discover new music.
if you like having yoru options fed to you like a sheep, then good for you. I just dont see how you can see anything wrong with being able to explore for yourself every song ever recorded…for free. Unless of course your a sheep.
I listen to, gasp, (streamed) FM radio to discover new music. In particular, KEXP.org, a listener-supported radio station in Seattle. The DJs spoon feed me the new music I crave and I use KEXPlorer.com to track/list/comment on the music I like. I believe the human element of the DJ is far superior to the algorithms of Pandora.
i wondered why that music box showed up on my profile again…
hmm.. i wonder.. myspace music = Itunes for Google Android?
Interesting, will see how it competes with iTunes
First time response to Mr. A
I love the energy of this post! Whatever turns you on, keep on writing about it.
I, for one like it…
mike,
this statement is flat out inaccurate.
“Basically, everyone who controls rights to music is part of the new venture”
there are thousands of indies and millions of tracks from the indies that are not in on this.
myspace left the indies out.
ah baby.. lets do it.
I can’t wait to see how the MySpace Music experience will be compared to imeem, last.fm, and good ol iTunes.
I won’t be seeing anything on MySpace tonight or ever. Plus, I’m not a fan of R. Kelly or M. Jackson.
Thanks for the heads up MA, looks like I’ll be having a late night making sure my concert listings site http://www.HearWhere.com works with the new mySpace music.
I was hoping I’d get a heads-up like this
Myspace is a cesspool of the Internet’s vomit that has been sprayed all over the walls of the Internet. While Myspace music may be an ambitious and maybe even awesome idea, sites like Last.fm are still better.
At the end of the day it’s still just Myspace, and the people who possess an actual brain will know that you can dress up a piece of crap, but it’s still a piece of crap. Myspace music will be no different to the rest of the buggy, ugly and highly advertised supported site.
Lets not forget that Myspace is owned by NewsCorp, not exactly a role model company.
Other sources are saying the site launches Thursday? CNET, SF Chronicle, etc.. I’ll be checking at 9pm. Was that Pacific or Eastern time?
Launches at 12am dummies
PST
Am I the only person in the world that finds music, as it exists today, totally boring and impertinant? Yes, I guess I am.
I agree with you - 80s music is the best.
Well it’s about time! We’ve been hearing about this for months so I’m curious to see what they’ve been working on. While Myspace is arguably still the industry leader with respect to music discovery, they’ve failed in two ways. First, they don’t promote discovery by having a recommendation engine that would help bands cut through clutter of myspace artists. Second, the tools and content they provide haven’t proven to be very engaging. They simply don’t give fans any different of a music experience than the other discovery sites. Hopefully they can figure out a way to increase interaction and to give fans a truly amazing music experience. So, we’ll see…
I think Myspace failed when it didn’t fix the obvious bugs and server in-capabilities that run beneath the surface. If they actually used a decent programming language and maybe used some decent servers plus some decent server administrators to run Myspace, I might be jumping up and down in excitement for Myspace music.
Also, Myspace aren’t exactly innovators in giving it’s users an interactive and amazing experience with anything they do. Myspace does and always will suck with anything they do. They will however no doubt find a way to rip off artists that put their music on Myspace.
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Well it looks like myspace is making a come back. I just hope there site gets rid of all the predators on there. But hopefully someday, Myspace can evolve into something very good. But right now, I am staying away. I rather choose Facebook, but, I don’t really like that kind of social networking. Just my two cents.
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It’s 9:15 and still no update.
Myspace has never been particularly good on the execution front, anyone remember the ‘oops we banned all widgets’ accident?
Myspace music has been a long time coming, I mean it was obvious back that myspace wanted to do the on demand tunes and playlists ever since they banned imeem back in 2007.
It’s 10: 20 PST. I don’t see any update now. What’s going on?
I hate amazon.
I see someone named lindsay at myspace leaks this stuff to you guys…
Well so far I am not too impressed this should have been released as a beta product. Many of the searches I have peformed return songs that are not playable or they are shortened versions of the song. Seems very strange that they would be surfacing myspace user pages before the actual music????
Also the sound quality is crap pandora audio quality is a good 2 to 3 times better. Almost sounds like they have encoded these songs at 96K or maybe even 64K. I know that it is expensive to stream but at least have the same stream quality that everyone else has.
Great idea but not well executed so far. Plus where are the ads I have not seen one yet.
For the record and all the Techcrunch-Users from Germany: As MySpace Music launched only for US-Residents there is a service you can access in Germany: roccatune. We stream more than 1.5 million songs from all kind of artists and got deals with SonyBMG, EMI Music, Warner Music and more than 3.000 other labels. You can make your own playlists and share them with other users. It’s legal, for free and online.
Is MySpace Music’s goal to be totally DRM-free for all songs, or are the DRMless downloads via Amazon only available for particular artists/labels?
This is only going to work in the USA right?
I Spent a few minutes looking this thing over. Besides the player and the ability to create playlists, I don’t see anything new. As someone else mentioned, the sound quality is horrible (probably at the request of the major labels).
It’s also a shame Indie’s are getting the shaft on this also. It’s the Indies that made MySpace what it is today, and it’s the Indie’s who are the ones innovating- it’s really too bad they aren’t included (for the most part).
I’m kind of disappointed… I had initially thought that myspace artists would be able to sell any of their music to their fans right through their page. But this is not it… very disappointing.
This is really interesting. In fact, Senior Counsel at RealNetworks, Inc. and Rhapsody America will be speaking on a panel on Oct 15th from 6-9PM.
The event is all on current trends in music and alternative models. I think it is really relevant based on all that is going on now.
You can register at http://musicandtech.eventbrite.com
Anyone interested should register as it is expected to sell out.
Thanks for the heads up
It still is geared only for the majors.. they cut out the indies, although they dont say that.. the majors in effect tell them what to do.. .. this was a great hope.. i get great A&R’d from top music executives and produced by people that make the hits for the top artist today.. all at http://www.beatslocker.com …. rap beats and pop beats, …… all thats left is the promo, that still too expensive and myspace could of done that…..but myspace sold out…
I guess it is good that myspace is doing something to improve their overall experience, but I think they still lack when it comes to discovering new talent, which would be the independents. They need to setup a system in which the fans actually decide whos hot and not, instead of the fake plays, fake profile views etc. Pretty soon myspace will be a whole bunch of pages, with a whole bunch of songs, and a whole bunch of plays but with nobody really listening.
also if u like good music check out http://www.getbeatsonline.com
I know someone who works for the page that’s linked below.
http://www.songnumbers.com/christinamilian.php
Apparently, these guys and MySpace Music are launching some sort of mobile, American Idol type of promotion.
Artists will be able to create phone numbers where their fans can call in and listen to music, share it, buy it, etc.
The first artist they have planned this with (she already has a number in the page above) is Christina Milian.
It’s going to be all ad-supported and it’s supposed to be billed or taglined:
“Who will be the first mobile superstar?”
Also, it will be the largest push MySpace Music has ever done…maybe it’s part of the overall plan?
Like those billboards that were scooped and to be put up in LA and NYC?
The number on the page I linked will be on Christina’s page in something like 48 hours, with more artists coming…
it should be a good combinationation with already the best social website