IDG News Service —
MySpace Music represents a promising next step in the tumultuous integration of the Web into the music business, but its success hinges on a number of far-from-sure bets.
Among the key question marks are whether MySpace Music will generate enough advertising revenue to justify its very liberal free-streaming model and whether users will develop a strong-enough attachment to a service that lacks mobile portability.
If MySpace Music succeeds, it has the chance to become the preferred model for distributing and consuming music, resulting in benefits for fans, artists, software developers, labels and advertisers.
While time will tell whether MySpace Music succeeds or fails, it's clear that the service is a compelling and bold alternative to existing approaches, thanks to an innovative blend of technology and business models.
Currently, digital music is dominated by Apple with its iTunes store and song management software, which is tightly coupled with its iPod players. However, iTunes only streams portions of the songs it has for sale, and it lacks a subscription model.
Smaller rivals such as Real's Rhapsody and Napster not only sell individual tracks and albums but also, for a monthly fee, give people the option to subscribe to their catalogues. The subscriptions typically allow people to transfer songs to their portable music players and keep them there as long as the membership is active. However, these services allow little free streaming.
Then there are the Web 2.0 social music sites, such as Imeem, which generally offer broader free streaming with a heavy community aspect so people can share their likes and dislikes with friends and discover new music that way.
MySpace Music edges out Apple, Napster and Rhapsody via its massive catalogue of songs that can be streamed, in full, free and without limits via a PC. All four major labels own stakes in the MySpace Music joint venture.
With a social network of about 75 million in the U.S., where the music service is now available, MySpace can provide a more extensive social experience than the Web 2.0 social music sites.
For purchasing songs, MySpace Music has an exclusive agreement with Amazon's MP3 store, but it also aims to be broadly open and agnostic by supporting a variety of media player software and portable music devices. All songs purchased will be free of digital locks.
An area where MySpace Music falls short is in mobile devices, where the service appears only in the form of purchased songs. If MySpace came out with a mobile version of the service that offered free streaming, it would seriously hurt fee-based subscription services from Napster and Rhapsody and become an even mightier competitor.
