So Much For MySpace Music Revolutionizing The Business

from the it's-what-now? dept

Last year, we found it amusing that some in the press were claiming that MySpace Music was going to be "the most significant rollout of a digital-music service since Apple's iTunes." As we noted at the time, the whole concept behind MySpace Music seemed destined to fail, because no one seemed willing to admit that they had to compete with piracy. So rather than design a better product, they made yet another totally lame "official" online music service. And, like pretty much every other such service, users have almost entirely ignored it. Even the folks running MySpace Music are now admitting that the product sucks:

"It was plumbing and a playlist. But it wasn't overly social, it wasn't deep enough, and we didn't really empower the users to do what they wanted to do."

That's from Courtney Holt -- the guy who's now in charge, but who wasn't hired until after the launch. But, of course, the company has already blown the ability to get a lot of attention with a big launch. It totally overplayed that hand (though, many mainstream reporters bought into the hype totally). While Holt has plans for a total redo of the service, it's going to become increasingly difficult to dig themselves out of the ditch from being "the most significant rollout of digital-music service" that almost no one cared about.

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Slate: Dump MySpace Music, Bring Back Muxtape

from the i-second-that... dept

As we had suspected, the early reviews of MySpace Music make it sound like a dud. It sounds, not surprisingly, like the focus was on appeasing the big record labels, rather than actually making a service that's fun and easy to use. Farhad Manjoo, over at Slate, makes the argument clear, contrasting MySpace Music to Muxtape, the small indie site that the RIAA shut down when it couldn't own a big chunk of it. As Manjoo notes, Muxtape was fun, it worked well, and people liked it. MySpace Music, on the other hand, is just not that compelling. He notes that it doesn't offer anything other sites haven't offered for a while, and on top of it, makes the whole interface cluttered and confusing, while limiting what you can actually do. Once again, we see the RIAA shut down a useful service and put up a dreadful competitor.

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Independent Record Labels Missing From MySpace Music

from the forgetting-who-brought-you dept

The success of MySpace was helped along quite a bit by independent and non-major-label musicians using the site as a distribution mechanism and way to reach out to and connect with fans. So that's why we were surprised, earlier this week, about reports claiming that the new MySpace Music subsidiary was blocking out some indie labels and focusing mainly on just the major labels (most of whom own a piece of MySpace Music). After posting that message, we received a frantic phone call from someone at MySpace, angrily insisting that the story wasn't true. Our response to that, as always, is that they are free to correct any misconceptions in the comments, and if there were factual errors, we would correct them in the post. Unfortunately, no one at MySpace took us up on that offer.

Yet, now the Financial Times is also reporting that a number of well known bands and independent record labels are complaining about being locked out of MySpace Music -- including the Arctic Monkeys, a band who has been considered one of the poster children for using MySpace to become big. It looks like MySpace has become infatuated with the big labels, and the folks who made MySpace the success it is are being left out in the cold. MySpace, undoubtedly, will claim that it offered the independent labels fair terms which they rejected, but when the site itself is owned in part by the major record labels, it's not hard to understand why the indies might feel that they're not getting a very fair deal.

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