Crenk

Here at Crenk we have already reported about Myspace and their new music offering several times. It seems now that the launch is imminent. The LA Times has reported that Myspace will be launching their music offering as early as tomorrow. The new service will compete directly with iTunes and will be offering music downloads, streams, videos and mobile phone ring tones, along with related items, such as merchandise and concert tickets.

Stay tuned for more coverage about the launch in coming days.

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.

MySpace will open its doors to outside developers to hopefully maintain its dominant leadership in the competitive social networking segment. Most journalist say that Facebook is the leader in this spac, but i really just cant understand why! Myspace has a lot more pageviews and active members, the only thing going for Facebook is that their interface and design is alot slicker.

Initially announced in October 2007, this is an initiative of the newly assigned COO Amit Kapur to catch up with Facebook. The API will be released to third-party developers this coming February 5. According to independent consultant Ben Metcalfe who advised about this program:

“I can appreciate that in the past MySpace has not always been perceived as playing as well in this space as it could — especially around turning off widgets for unclear reasons. However, in the run-up to this launch, I’ve sensed a very different approach — one that understands the importance of playing well and being a good actor in the community.”

Myspace seems to be finally improving their user interface. Today they released a new beta home page which can be selected after sign-in. For so long myspace was just winning the race in social networking by sheer number of users and customizability options. However, since Facebook has opened up, there seems to be much more of a struggle and Myspace need to pull their finger out and get the site looking professional.

There are still a lot of issues on myspace that annoy me, for example music launching on a profile once it is opened and some profiles are just so high in flash and other objects it just shuts down my browser. With these new interface and nav options it seems to be looking a lot more professional and even has little web 2.0 looking buttons.

Options now include module selection and customizable colour combination. The new profile editor is only available for Internet Explorer users. Well I suppose one step at a time!

Web Chat Startup eBuddy, who are currently in competition with Meebo, just added support for Myspace instant messaging.

eBuddy now supports MySpace IM, AOL, ICQ, GoogleTalk, MSN and Yahoo. Log in to some of all of these services from the eBuddy home page.

MySpace says they now have over 18.5 million users of the service, which soft launched in September 2006. By comparison, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM have 224 million, 93 million, 30 million and 30 million users, respectively (Comscore worldwide - July 2007). GTalk trails the rest, with just 4.8 million users.