MySpace Music, which launched a little less than a year ago, is the one bright spot of growth in an otherwise flatlining MySpace.
But all that popularity comes at a price – billions of free streaming songs are costing MySpace up to $10 million a month in streaming fees, says a source, and the joint venture may lose $20 million or more this year.
To minimize those losses, MySpace has made a big change to its product – songs no longer auto-play when you visit a MySpace user profile. Autoplays accounted for a billion or more song streams per month, and were costing MySpace a significant amount of money. Turning off that hose is a cost saving maneuver. This also has the benefit, sources say, of improving the user experience and providing labels with better listening data.
Personally, I’ve always disliked the autoplay feature on MySpace, although execs there tended to defend it as one of the distinguishing features of the service. Users can still opt-in to autoplay songs. → Read More
As more details emerge about the MySpace-iLike acquisition, all sorts of interesting observations and questions pop up. A few thoughts:
The Facebook Angle
This is by far the most interesting angle to the deal. iLike is the most popular music application on Facebook, and is the de facto Facebook Music app. That company will shortly be owned by MySpace, Facebook’s primary competitor. That puts Facebook in a lose-lose situation. They can let iLike continue to dominate the music scene on Facebook and let MySpace own all that. Or they can ban iLike and lose all credibility with their platform – everyone would know iLike was banned because of the acquisition by MySpace. And it doesn’t have to be an outright ban. Facebook has plenty of subtle ways of trainwrecking an application they don’t like. Keep an eye on this.
Why didn’t Facebook just buy iLike? A matching or slightly better offer than the $20 million MySpace is paying would likely have gotten the deal done. And it may have saved Facebook from an embarrassing situation.
If I were MySpace, I’d focus on getting their free streaming music into the iLike Facebook application as soon as possible. Advertisers will love it. → Read More
MySpace is close to acquiring popular social music service iLike, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. The deal, which should close this week, will be MySpace’s first acquisition since new CEO Owen Van Natta took control of the company in April 2009. The price is “around $20 million.”
iLike, which launched in late 2006, is a social music recommendation service that now has more than 50 million registered users. It tracks what you listen to and like and gives you recommendations on new music based on that data as well as what your friends are listening to. It is the top music application on Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and just about every other social network other than MySpace, which has MySpace Music. → Read More
When Heath Ledger passed away in January 2008, he had no shortage of things he was working on. Just about everyone in the world, it seems, saw The Dark Knight, but he had smaller projects too. One of those was directing a music video for the band Modest Mouse, for their song “King Rat.” Today, that video debuts on MySpace Music.
The video, which is animated, is meant be a statement against modern whaling practices in Ledger’s home country of Australia. Sadly, Ledger died before he could complete the video, so The Masses, a film and music company Ledger was a partner in, stepped in along with co-director Daniel Auber to finish it. → Read More
MySpace may not be the hottest thing in social networking any longer, with visitor numbers and page views decreasing at an alarming rate, but apparently its free music streaming service MySpace Music is still something of a hit.
According to Nielsen data (PDF) for June 2009, traffic to MySpace’s music subdomain has grown 190% since its launch in September 2008 and year-over-year traffic to the URL has increased a staggering 1,017%. This traffic includes at least one visit by our own MG Siegler, who was happy to learn Pearl Jam’s new single premiered exclusively on the service. → Read More
One thing is for certain – the six month old MySpace Music project is throwing off a lot of cash to the labels. That’s because MySpace’s 75 million or so U.S. users are streaming literally billions of songs a month. And they have to pay for every song streamed.
Labels are known to give streaming rates for on demand music of around half a cent per song play, but they are negotiated on a deal by deal and label by label basis. Journalists have tried repeatedly to understand the rates that MySpace is paying since the volume means lots of dollars are at stake. MySpace has always guarded this information closely, since it’s a competitively valuable piece of information. But there’s another reason they may be so secretive – the deals they cut with the four big labels may all be very different. And the deal they cut with at least one label, Warner Music, may not have streaming rates at all.
Our sources say Warner has been complaining about the deal they did with MySpace. That deal has no per song streaming cost, but includes a revenue share on advertising displayed when the song is played. That revenue share hasn’t been what they thought it would be. And the staggering number of plays of songs from their catalog, combined with their newly acquired knowledge that their competitors are being paid per stream, has left them steaming mad. → Read More
MySpace Music, the joint venture between MySpace and the major labels to provide free streaming music to users, is announcing its executive team this afternoon. The president of the company, Courtney Holt, was announced late last year. Today the company showing off the rest of the team.
The key new executives are Jamie Kantrowitz (SVP Strategy and Global Marketing), Alex Maghen (CTO), Nancy Taylor (Lead Counsel, VP Business Development & Legal Affairs) and Roberto Fisher (VP Product and Operations).
Kantrowitz and Fisher were previously with MySpace and transition over to the music team. Maghen previously was CTO of both Yahoo Music/Launch and MTV Networks Online. Taylor has held a number of senior management positions with major music companies, most recently as SVP of Warner/Chappel Music. → Read More
Over the last few weeks MySpace Music has quietly rolled out a number of new features that should make the service significantly more appealing to consumers. While MySpace Music kicked off to an fairly impressive start when it launched last September, seeing a huge amount of traffic and streamed songs, even its President Courtney Holt has conceded that it wasn’t very user-friendly and didn’t bring many new features to the table. The initial launch of MySpace Music was mostly about laying the groundwork to build a sustainable business. Now, the site is shifting focus to deliver what its consumers want.
The most readily apparent update is the site’s new music player, which is quicker than its predecessor and will soon feature user-customizable skins. Searching has also been overhauled, with a new focus on helping users find artists with a Google-like “Did you mean”, as well as verified artist profiles so users don’t have to stumble across impostors. → Read More
There’s something wrong with CBS Radio’s press release announcing the launch, complete with silly “countdown,” of 92.3 Now FM in New York City, a contemporary hit radio station that will replace K-Rock on Wednesday, March 11, at 5:00pm. (Contemporary hit radio, in plain English, means garbage pop songs, distinguished by their use of auto-tune and use of lowest-common-denominator song-writing.) CBS Radio Senior Vice-President of Something or Other, Don Bouloukos, is quoted in the release as saying, “Our assets in the country’s No. 1 market include among them the best known brands in the business. From the most listened to news and sports stations in the country, to the classic sounds of WCBS FM and the adult contemporary styling of Fresh 102.7, CBS RADIO offers something for everyone in the market – including young adults who are using the radio to discover today’s most popular music as featured on 92.3 NOW FM.” [Emphasis added, obviously.] And that, friends, is why the radio business, as we know it, is truly doomed. No, Mr. Bouloukos, young people are not turning on their radio to discover new music; they’re certainly not sticking around to listen to new music on a commercial radio station. No, sir, that’s what the Internet is for, and thats why your business has no future. → Read More
I’m not sure if this was moved up in response to leaked copiess of U2′s newest album, No Line On The Horizon spreading across the Internet, but the entire the album will be streamed for free at MySpace Music. The player in U2′s MySpace Music page features a single, but if you click on the top album in the sidebar, you can hear the entire thing. MySpace says that the entire album will be streamed from February 20 to March 3, with links to pre-order it.
This is akin to Radiohead offering a free download of their album In Rainbows for a limited time, except without the download. It is good marketing, at it helps the band try to keep control over distribution. Although, that Bittorrent cat is already out of the bag. (The unreleased album leaked out and has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times by fans who just can’t wait for U2′s perfectly planned release schedule. → Read More
MySpace Music added a few hundred thousand songs to its streaming music service today by signing up four more independent-label aggregators (Nettwerk Music Group, INgrooves, IRIS Distribution, and RoyaltyShare) plus indie label Wind-up Records. This comes at a time when Facebook is still facing hurdles to launching its own music service. → Read More
Facebook’s ongoing effort to launch a free streaming music service is stalled, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. The company was close to a deal that would bring free streaming music from three of the four big labels (Universal, Sony, EMI) through the Total Music joint venture. But the deal stalled when the lone holdout, Warner Music, refused to participate.
Through most of 2008 Facebook said on and off record that they had no real interest in their own music application and that third parties like iLike could continue to build their Facebook music applications without fear of competition directly from Facebook.
News leaked in the Fall, though, that Facebook had approached a number of third parties to power the official Facebook music application: → Read More
MOG demo’d the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far.
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.
All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009. → Read More
At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.
This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.
The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.
I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer. → Read More
Last night we released the finalist names for the Crunchies Awards. Vote here for who you think should win. We’ve set up a site that is pretty self-explanatory, with all of the names of each finalist for every category, along with links to their Websites and Crunchbase profiles where you can learn more about each one before voting. The Crunchies represents the best the Web had to offer in 2008, and you get to help choose who will win. Below is a voter’s guide for two of the major categories to get you started.
Best Overall is the big prize. Amazon Web Services makes it as a finalist this year because of the sheer number of startups that are built on top of its cloud computing infrastructure. Facebook won last year, but makes a return as a nominee due to popular demand. Facebook continued to gain massive mainstream adoption in 2008 (with 140 million members now) and launched some major initiatives to extend its social computing platform beyond its site, most notably Facebook Connect (which by itself is a finalist for Best Technology Innovation, going up against Google Friend Connect). But does Facebook deserve to win again? → Read More
Just in via Twitter: Pandora has registered its 20 millionth user. The three-year old music streaming service is trying to hold its own despite tough economics and recent layoffs.
Its music-recommendation engine pumps out personalized radio stations over the Web, and its iPhone app remains one the top free apps on iTunes (currently No. 21). → Read More
Chinese Democracy, the first new Guns N’ Roses album since 1991, debuts tonight at 9 PM PST exclusively on MySpace Music, where fans can listen to it for free.
Well, actually it debuted on BitTorrent a while ago, but we’re not talking about that. Also, the band has previously released two songs, Chinese Democracy and Better, to radio stations and music sites in the past couple of weeks.
But tonight is the big debut, and for most people it will be the first time they hear the music. It will be available in 25 countries: US, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Turkey, Poland, India, Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan. → Read More
Last Thursday John Battelle sat down with MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman to discuss the future of music.
Some interesting things were said, including remarks by Bronfman that Warner will only sign new artists if they agree to give the label a cut of all possible revenue streams. But the biggest story about the talk, by far, was this: MySpace may be creating a music device.
At least that’s what dozens of blogs and mainstream news outlets reporte. A sample: → Read More
MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and Warner Music Group’s Edgar Bronfman take the stage with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit this evening. The topic: The Future Of Music.
The time is ripe. MySpace has launched it’s new MySpace Music initiative; Facebook continues to explore its options.
Our live notes are below:
John Battelle starts things off by noting that MySpace Music continues to not have a CEO (they’ll announce it shortly). DeWolfe says they’ll make an announcement shortly – it isn’t coming this evening. → Read More
MySpace has offered MTV Networks’ EVP Digital Music and Media Courtney Holt the top job at the newly launched MySpace Music, CNET reports. We’ve confirmed this through our own sources, and we believe Holt has all but accepted the position and is in the final stages of contract negotiation.
The hunt for a CEO is nearly a year old. Earlier this year we reported on some of the early candidates. Last month we reported that ex-Facebooker Owen Van Natta was interviewing for the position, but those discussions were somewhat complicated by a simultaneous effort by Van Natta to sell Project Playlist to MySpace as well.
Currently Holt is Executive Vice President, Digital Media, MTV Networks Music and Logo Group where he oversees all digital initiatives. → Read More
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