Finally MySpace Unveils Online Music Store

By Jenny Huntington
20:40, September 25th 2008

Recently, MySpace has launched an online music store that promises to offer the website’s members the opportunity to listen to streamed tracks on their Personal Computers for free. Moreover, they can create playlists and also download their favourite songs. Nevertheless, for the latter feature, users have to pay. MySpace partenered for the service with major music labels including Sony BMG, Universal, Warner and EMI, as well as with The Orchard, a leading distributor and marketer of independent music.

Currently, there are only a few thousand tracks available at the net store, but MySpaces promises the number to soar to millions in the future. All of the songs are said to be Digital Rights Management-free.

The free tracks cannot be downloaded onto any device. But the player links to Amazon.com's music store, where users can purchase them for download.

The new site is expected to give MySpace a boost in its bid to catch up with Facebook, which overtook it this year as the world's most popular social networking site. Record companies also see the venture as a key strategy to recoup the revenue lost from declining CD sales, which have plunged from an estimated 12 billion dollars in 1999 to a projected 5 billion dollars this year.

"Warner Music Group is very pleased to be entering into this groundbreaking joint venture," said Edgar Bronfman Jr, Warner Music Group's chairman and chief executive officer.

"This venture may provide a defining blueprint for this next important stage in the evolution of social media, benefiting consumers, artists and music companies alike," he said.

The main competitor on the market for MySpace is Apple Incorporated’s iTunes digital store, which since its inception in 2003 has sold more that 5 billion tracks. The digital media app named iTunes was first introduced by Apple on January 9, 2001. The iTunes Store enables users to both buy and download music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, podcasts, feature length films and Movie Rentals. The majority of the tracks available at Apple’s digital store are copy protected with Apple's FairPlay DRM system.

The alternative for the iTunes Store comes from a social networking website that hosts approximately 5 million profiles of bands and artists, enabling communication between the latter and their fans. Headquartered in Beverly Hills, California, MySpace employs 300 people and is said to attract 230,000 new users daily.