MySpace opened Thursday its highly-anticipated MySpace Music service. The move is certainly good news for its approximately 120 million users, but it irritated a group that licenses song rights for thousands of independent labels.

MySpace Music service offers the site’s users free access to a great number of tracks from the biggest recording labels in the industry. MySpace will earn big money from on-site ads and the vending of songs through Amazon.com's MP3 downloading service.

The new service brought together big names of the music industry such as Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Inc., Universal Music Group and EMI Music. The four giant labels put their catalogs together and MySpace Music will work as a joint venture between the labels and MySpace. Sony ATV/Music Publishing and The Orchard are also involved, but they do not have equity stakes.

On the other hand, other independent labels were angered because they were left out of the deal. Merlin, a London-based licensing agency representing about 12,000 independent labels including Epitaph, Koch Records and Tommy Boy, was very frustrated by MySpace’s decision to leave them out of the deal.

"We're extremely disappointed that they seem to misread their constituents so badly that they've ignored what we think is their core, their sweet spot, when they launched," said Merlin CEO, Charles Caldas.

Merlin is currently in talks with MySpace attempting to get its members involved in the MySpace Music deal.

Back to MySpace Music; the service offers its users free access to hundreds of thousands of songs and they can transfer the tracks to their mp3 players after downloading them for a fee on Amazon.com.