So the day finally came last Thursday – MySpace finally unveiled it’s much talked about MySpace Music Platform.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably had a chance to check it out or at least noticed the large amount of buzz the service has gotten over the weekend. Even so, many do not know of the updates features the service offers, so let’s do a quick rundown of what you can find at the new MySpace Music.
First, MySpace has made a deal with the 3 major labels months ago (and recently got EMI on board in addition to indy catalog The Orchard) to stream music from their catalog for free.
That’s right – I said free. Search for an artist, find the song, and it opens a music player for you to listen to. This works in a similar fashion to iMeem or the subscription service Rhapsody. You can create multiple playlists, add songs to your profile, etc.
In addition to listening to the free streaming tracks, you can also purchase the tracks for .$99 via the Amazon mp3 store (this is the “iTunes killer” many have been chatting about since the service was first talked about).
A significant improvement over the MySpace of old, it’s great to know there’s another destination online for me to find free music. And it seems MySpace has done a good job of convincing the big boys that music can be monetized through advertising (which of course is all over the place) and through partnerships with Amazon, which has a very exhaustive mp3 download service that rivals iTunes.
I like the idea that this will open the possibilities of people discovering music online – those who are unfamiliar with sites like iMeem and Last.fm will be exposed to streaming music in quantities for the first time.
Unfortunately for those who ARE familiar with these services, MySpace misses the mark.
To start, and I’ve mentioned this before, is that the MySpace streaming player SUCKS.
The sound quality is horrible compared to the other networks, and I’ll gladly pay the $15 a month to Rhapsody to actually hear the goddamn music.
Second, the search capabilities are HORRIBLE. When I first read about this new music service, I kept going to MySpace, trying to figure out what was so neat about it.
I would search for an artist, only to find the usual Google powered search results. It did not seem to be some huge catalog of music. Only after I found a specific kind of search box did I find the U2 music I was looking for.
And it was randomly organized, and did not include every track. I tried to find maybe an artist page that listed all the music, but was instead taken to the U2 MySpace page which only features the songs they already had on it’s profile.
What’s the point of having this huge catalog of music if no one can find it?
A few other things bugged me, like all the steps it takes to add songs to your playlist, but those things should get ironed out after some usability testing is done. Hopefully they improve on the search capabilities and make it a little more obvious to the newcomers that a huge catalog of music is available for them to listen to.
Lastly, the service seems to have blown off the indy artists of the world. I’m not talking about the Indy labels, like those affiliated with The Orchard, but those who run their own show. Shouldn’t they have some kind of ad-revenue sharing interface where an artists can upload it’s entire catalog and get a small % of ad revenue? All in do time I suppose.
What are your thoughts on this new and improved MySpace Music? Do you think it had the potential to level the playing field and take some of the dominance that iTunes holds, or is it a half-assed attempt to duplicate some of the better services on the web?
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Honestly, I don’t want to be the early-adopting chasmhead here but to me, Myspace is 2006. We had some good times.
I always tend to wait and catch a vibe off the blogs when new stuff is rolling out before getting into myself, but it seems to me as if we’ve got everything crappy about myspace (shoddy player + search) and nothing of that quintessential essence that built myspace: small, niche acts hungry to leverage exposure and – attempting – to create meaningful fan interactions.
Myspace Music maybe the new (mainstream) radio. Still don’t mean I need to hear a new Rihanna single more than once.
You nailed it. I can’t support the service until it supports me, the indie bands, promoters, venues and fans that made the service what it is today.
I can listed to any number of services for better music quality, music discovery ad easier searching.
So yea, good try Myspace, but you dropped the ball.
If anything, it will open up people to services that actually do it right – once people get comfortable using the platform, maybe everyone will think twice about streaming everything.
So as much as I’ll talk shit on the service, at least they got to make the deal with the majors, who are looking for a way to make sense (and cents) of the future. Who knows, if it works, they might dump the money in to make the service everything it could be (or just buy someone that does it right!)
[...] that enable artists to connect with fans. Once you break through the wall of no-brainers like MySpace and Facebook, it can be kind of intimidating with all the other networks and tools out there, [...]