MySpace launched its online music service named, not surprisingly, MySpace Music on Thursday. The News Corporation-owned social network pulled back the curtain on a portal that will allow MySpace users to build an infinite number of playlists of major- and independent-label songs of ad-supported streams while also enabling direct purchases of songs from Amazon's MP3 store.
My initial verdict: It's a start but for something they've been allegedly working for many months, the performance is not terribly consistent.
As users have been able to do on sites like Last.FM, iMeem, iLike for a year or longer, MySpace music users will be able to stream complete songs from the Universal Music, EMI, SonyBMG and Warner Music catalogs, as well as those from independent music distributors such as the Orchard, ADA and Fontana. Like the other sites, MySpace Music's business model will be a hybrid ad-supported and affiliate-fee model. (Affiliate fee meaning just as iMeem gets a small percentage of the sale for every buyer they drive to the iTunes store; MySpace Music will get something from Amazon. MySpace Music personnel declined to go into any detail about the licensing agreement is has with Amazon.) For Amazon, this could be a very nice customer acquisition agreement assuming a significant, or at least meaningful number of MySpace users are willing to actually pay for content.
I played around with it on Thursday. The browser-based player, generally speaking, looks very nice. There's a slot for banner ads in the player and during the demo it didn't appear to be too intrusive. Creating playlists seemed relatively straightforward. For most songs, there will be a "buy" button next to any version cleared for sale. Users are redirected to the Amazon MP3 song where, if they already have an account, they can go straight to the download. For those without an account, they'll be asked to create one. Users younger than 18 or without a credit card simply have to go buy one of Amazon's prepaid cards.
While they've created a nice, average user interface, and the player works reliably well the overall experience of song searches was, and I'm being blunt now, really "old school." Like early versions of pressplay or the Sony Connect store, and not in a fondly nostalgic way. It seems that in a rush to get a bunch of content, a lot of chaff got through. Some examples:
- When I did an artist search for Stevie Ray Vaughn, I got the requisite number of SRV songs but also a ton of terrible remixes of SRV songs; poorly encoded copies of SRV material and just plain dead files. (Meaning when I hit play, I got a "Cannot play this song" error message. If it can't be played, why is it showing up in any search result?) To me, using search/discovery/recommendation tools doesn't mean I want to play hide and seek.
- Consistency: if one can search for a song and the song shows up in results and includes the original album art (to me indicating maybe it's legit) and one can add it to a playlist, shouldn't it play? (Grateful Dead, some Mogwai, number of other examples were found.)
- There were too many dupes – multiple entries for the same artists/song/album – on multiple searches. The results for "Eric Clapton" were particularly egregious.
- I'm sorry, when I punch in "Jerry Garcia" in search, I shouldn't get "Gurls Wit da' Boom" by some guy named "Proof" in the search results. That's just wrong. Funny, but still wrong.
- While I agree humor has a place in music, am I supposed to be laughing at the search results?
But here's what I can't argue with: MySpace has tremendous reach as a portal – millions and millions and millions of users. It is important that MySpace was able to secure the deal with the labels to get licensed content into the service that users can play for free. What matters now is how they plan to evolve the service, to differentiate it from the many other sites providing free (ad-supported) streams.
How do we measure the impact on the online music market? For the moment, I think it's going to be what kind of sales it can drive to Amazon.
I just went to myspace and couldn't get any music to play. Something has to be wrong or maybe I am not doing the right things. Its like the music has died on myspace. Is there something that changed along with this new service??
