News / General News
Will MySpace Keep Streaming Free Music? Maybe.

In an interesting and fairly ambiguous interview posted at TechCrunch, MySpace co-Presidents discuss the current state of MySpace and the status of streaming music across its site. Besides allowing bands to host several songs in a streaming media on MySpace, the site also streams hundreds of thousands of full-length albums (paying fractions of pennies on each stream, but which still adds up to millions and millions of dollars each month). Without a doubt, many bands have fled their MySpace pages to create Facebook pages and other assorted social media destinations. Anecdotally, the amount of bulletins I get each day from bands has decreased dramatically. But more importantly, no site makes it easier for bands to make a first impression than MySpace. It is by far the easiest site to put your music in front of people and to present the essentials such as tour dates and ways to contact and connect with a band, and it’s design customization beats the snot out of the clean, but conformist style of Facebook (which in truly shocking fashion, has still not figured out a way for musicians to make streaming as upfront as it is on MySpace). For this, it’s vitally imperative for the independent music community to keep tabs on MySpace’s movements on music streaming, and making sure that the role of music on the site becomes a to big to fail issue — if streaming music ends on MySpace, the site will likely go down in flames with it.