MySpace Music Launches Tonight and It Looks Very Cool
The long awaited MySpace Music service is launching tonight around 9pm PST. (It's the old site at that link right now.) We just got off the phone with the company for a briefing and we liked what we saw. It's going to be a very big deal.
Users will be able to assemble playlists from a huge catalog of songs from all four major labels and from independent distributor The Orchard, full length songs are all streamable for free, users will be able to purchase DRM-free MP3s through a close integration with the AmazonMP3 service and developers will have a gradually increasing amount of access to user activity data from the Music section. Screen shots below.
The Interface
The MySpace Music interface looks quite nice, with drag and drop playlist creation, dynamically re-populating players and a pop-up player that plays music when you leave a page. There are a lot of nice little touches.
One of the most interesting might be that when you're listening to an artist in the music player, you see a feed of their most recent profile activity right next to it. MySpace says this means "you can be a part of their lives and they of yours!" That might be an insultingly condescending way to describe it, but the feature is cool.
Below: Search and playlist building.
Below: The player.
The Business
There's been some question about who will run MySpace Music and sure enough, the project is launching without a CEO. The company gave us a typically disingenuous PR explanation that they "are being really picky" about selecting one.
That's inconsequential for users, though, isn't it? Brand advertisers paying for all this streaming music is great news for us. MySpace wouldn't go into any details about anything financial but said they had "a very close relationship with Amazon." Who knows what that means? Maybe that AmazonMP3 really hopes to ride MySpace's coat tails to market dominance and thus gave them a good break.
What About the Competition?
We've written extensively about competition in the streaming music space but we asked MySpace about Imeem in particular. SVP of Product Strategy Steve Pearman said "it's hard to build community around content alone" (probably news to Imeem) and pointed out that MySpace could be considered the world's second largest provider of email service behind Hotmail.
Apparently the point is that MySpace is a huge full-service stop where people are already gathering. We buy that and we think MySpace Music will be a strong player. This author intends to try it out at length, if for no other reason than to get away from the PR agents crawling all over Facebook. We've written about what the perfect streaming music service might look like - we wonder how close this will come.
Check it out for yourself later tonight and let us know what you think.
1 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/8434
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
holy crap. I might actually use something MySpace created.
This looks really cool! I really enjoy Imeem, so it will be interesting to see how MySpace Music compares.
Any word on if MySpace Music's player and/or playlists will be embeddable outside of MySpace?
Looks and sounds really cool. It just might be the thing that will get me to use myspace.
I've used MySpace for music discovery for some time, last.fm as my streaming player, and itunes for purchasing music, so MySpace Music appears to be marrying it all together for me and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
Marshall, if you want to "friend" me on MySpace, I'm at: www.myspace.com/mmichele1 And I swear, I won't flack you! It's tech-free zone and all music.
;-)
I am a fan of myspace! I like to keep in touch with friends and share funky stuff we find. This will be interesting to see how the Music space works. Hopefully not much bugs... to deal with
Thanks for the information you have done a marvelous job with your site. :)
Ugh. I signed in to see if the new MySpace music was A) up yet and B) worth a damn.
After login they showed me an interstitial ad.
Then, when I clicked through to "Music" I was greeted by a seriously annoying Flash overlay ad for the new iPod Nano.
Granted, I saw the old MySpaceMusic, and maybe they did great work on the new one, but they'll ruin the new UI by plastering ads all over it right quick.
Just checked out the site...and all I can say is wow...Every freaking artist is there and for free
Posted by: Gadiel Rivera
|
September 24, 2008 4:42 PM
Hey, so i just made a piczo site and it looks so awesome but it seemed that something was missing. Than I realized I should add some music so my friend recommended a really cool site.www.hypster.com. It's so quick and easy, anyone could do it! In a matter of minuets I had made a account and uploaded the music onto my music player, not only that but You can also edit your music player to match your site colours! And if you don't want to upload your own music, you can search on other user’s playlists and take any songs you want! It works for piczo, myspace; facebook, bebo etc. check it out! www.hypster.com
it's providing good knowledge about your blog
so thanks more info.WORLD MOTEL
Still exists!
Its name is "Space Jammer" and it plays MySpace music and creates playlists.
You can buy the music you are listening to directly out of the program at amazon, musicload, 7digit, cd-baby or iTunes (vers. 1.4). You also can watch videos of the bands, send comments to them and much more. The program is freeware and available at:
www.spacejammer.com
Such a service still exists since May 08. Its name is "Space Jammer", a software client for MySpace Music. You can create own playlists, search for artists, their videos or additional informations. You can buy the music of the bands from different music-portals, directly out of the program. The perfect streaming service.
www.spacejammer.com
I have found this post while searching Google and I am glad I found it. Thanks for sharing tips with us.
I have found this post while searching Google and I am glad I found it. Thanks for sharing tips with us.