MySpace’s Mistake

MySpace recently made a strategic move by starting MySpace Music. This upgrade of MySpace now allows users to access free streams of music by all the major labels and most of the independent labels. To obtain the music from the major labels, MySpace had to sign deals with the labels, giving them roughly 40% ownership of MySpace Music.

Now we are beginning to see what this investment allows the major labels. Users of the popular Project Playlist (www.playlist.com) received a nasty surprise this morning when their MySpace widgets mysteriously stopped working.

Project Playlist functioned much like Muxtape (which was also recently pressured legally by the RIAA to shut down). Through Project Playlist, you can create a playlist of your favorite songs. These songs are pulled from different sites around the internet.

Well, the major labels don’t like this. So MySpace, one of the best spots for music discovery and sharing music with your friends, is caving into pressure from the labels to remove this great form of music discovery.

What a shame. It obviously makes sense – the labels make money from the streams on MySpace, not from people sharing songs and streaming them from other locations. Project Playlist also competes directly with MySpace’s streams.

But, this is really a shame on MySpace’s part. MySpace is a social networking site. People network through music. If people are using Project Playlist to share music, maybe it’s because they find it easier than MySpace’s method of sharing music. So, why doesn’t MySpace seek to somehow incorporate Project Playlist into their streams or at least buy them so that all music from the playlist is streamed through MySpace’s collection.

The interesting part about this is that Facebook has not followed MySpace’s path. Facebook is continuing to allow Project Playlist widgets. In fact, they also just hired Playlist’s chief operating officer Owen Van Natta to the Facebook staff.

I think this will have a seriously negative impact on MySpace Music. Since the only thing they really have going for themselves is their music networking (getting friend requests from 99 yr old child abductors gets lame), I foresee a stronger use of Facebook in the future for social networking about music.

Stay tuned,
Erik
erikrostad.com