Around September of this year Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. owned Myspace.com will have a new music service backed by three major record labels – Universal, Sony, and Warner Music. The music will be free, but the delivery method will be ad-supported. Sounds great, to be honest – I wouldn’t even mind watching a 15 to 30 second flash based advertisement for a song. There is no immediate report as to how much content from Sony is actually going to be available, nor the bitrate and DRM restrictions imposed with the music. One would expect that they would just be regular *.mp3’s if they are truly interested in making a service that will be successful.
I’ve downloaded music before from Myspace using file2hd.com, which is a website that extracts data links quickly (in this case, links to mp3’s on Myspace Music pages) and enables someone to get just about any song that’s popular at a 96kbps bitrate. I prefer to have all of my music in 256kbps or higher, but I digress..
The Fortune article I pulled this story from also states that there may not be great success with this service when it is introduced. The reason why analysts are so skeptical is because there is another service out there called iMeem that allows someone to have a custom music playlist of similiar functionality that can be used anywhere which rivals the new Myspace service. iMeem even has EMI, a record label that Myspace doesn’t have. However, iMeem isn’t really that profitable – and Myspace has financial power. The new Myspace music service should go well, but one must be realistic and understand that this will be just yet another service in the myriad of others out there. Is it time yet for a unified forefront?
