Myspace Music Upgrades and Promises More

After a sluggish start, Myspace Music is starting to upgrade its services. The President of Mypace Music, Courtney Holt, explains that the recent introduction of quicker, lightweight music player is just the beginning. The service plans to launch “album pages”, as opposed to the normal user page, and improve search utility.

Myspace Music is the product of a deal between Myspace and the four major labels early 2008. Almost six months after its subsequent launch, which featured customizable pages, they have also removed limits on the number of songs of artist’s playlists. The new album pages will be dedicated to specific albums for listening, and users will have the powerful comment section to discuss an album’s merits and failures, and Holt says that:

“I have always wanted to have one place on the Internet to have an open dialogue around an album that is iconic.”

All the other music streaming services, like Last.fm and Pandora, are expanding by releasing mobile phone applications, but Holt believes that streaming music on mobile phones isn’t a proper business model. He confirms that “right now a large number of people are sharing links back to public playlists on MySpace. We are going to start to figure out how to go beyond that and we have some ideas,” but at the same time wants to “make sure we can create revenue from that.”

As far as expansion into other markets, he thinks that “there is a lot of ‘hyper-syndication’ on the Net, and it hasn’t returned a high value. We want to make sure there’s a business to go with that. We don’t want to just do it.”

Myspace Music maintains a more defensive stance regarding distribution and breadth, but guarantees that it will find a way to advance. It looks as though Myspace is being managed more and more like a company, and not like the free music service we once knew. Meanwhile, other music services are picking up the pace. Is Myspace’s caution a smart move?

Source: NewYorkTimes