Myspace has launched its very own music service, while i do like supporting independent artists i think that Myspace is the wrong vehicle.
Whilst Myspace has a large user base this user base is mainly of the same demographic, so if I were an independent artist I wouldn’t just want to make my music available to one section of the world. This is were iTunes is a semi-solution whilst the pricing and money proportioning is absolute rubbish (at least there trying to their best with the greedy labels) but you can quite easily reach a wide set of people easily.
MySpace isn’t in it for the betterment of the music industry there in it for the money, you only have to look at its ad saturated interface.
I am going to go off on a bit of a tangent now but it is relevant.
Record Labels are suing the next generation of their consumers on a daily basis, my sister still finds it hard to grasp that just because you can get it for free doesn’t make it legal, but young people live online and consume most of there media online you only have to look at the explosion of P2P, Blogging, Podcasting etc. But the labels still insist the best way to tackle the problem get there money back.
I would much rather be able to download any music for free and then have to option to then pay the artist, I know people may abuse this but if the artist is really that good people like me would go and donate (or whatever you want to call it) to the artist.
It is no longer the labels that should make the profit it should be the artist who get the re-ward for there work.
I think this quote just highlights what is wrong (its from memory so may be slightly inaccurate) “We will sue anybody who downloads music associated with our label” Virgin Records