Myspace To Open Music Portal in Joint Venture
We have learnt that News Corp is trying to put together a joint venture for Myspace. The joint venture will run in a similar way to the current News Corp video product with NBC Universal. The joint venture will allow the major record labels to sign up to the service and receive a nice equity share in return for their content on the site. The full details have yet to be released, but im guessing the music will be DRM free with some sort of ad support. It is also still unknown if the service will be run as a portal from the myspace header bar or will actually run within the user profiles individually.
Myspace currently has over 7 million bands on their site and it should be hard to leverage this into huge profits, but they are still yet to come up with a plan on how to achieve this. With that amount of music and ability to go straight to market, they should really be challengers to Amazon, Rhapsody and iTunes.
paidContent report that no major labels are yet to sign, but the theory is that once one sign the rest will follow. I think Myspace are getting this whole situation wrong. They shouldnt just limit themselves to major labels, because they are in decline. Myspace should work on creating a tool in the admin of artist profiles which allows them to create a widget on their own individual sites. Thus, it will then have a tie in with a credit card company and the music will be directly delivered to your inbox. This solution also cuts out the problem of Paypal, but doesnt eliminate the issue of which currency to use on the system (because $US is in heavy decline). However, im very interested to see what system they adopt.
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