Myspace, the infamous online social network has just unveiled their new music service that they hope will take on the king of online music - Apple's Itunes.
Their offering is free listening to songs and music videos, charging you only for downloading the tracks. Other income streams will include concert tickets, ringtones and brand merchandise. An interesting point in all this for me is that you are free to copy any of the songs you have purchased.
"We look to music as an area where we want to do something huge; something historical," MySpace chief operating officer Amit Kapur told AFP.
The Myspace music channel is by no means new, having been an established part of the network for the past 4 years now. It has an average traffic rate of 30 million people per month.
Everybody is now talking about the so called "death knell" for compact disks, since digital formats are increasingly becoming more and more popular throughout the world.
The big question in my mind is whether all this will really come true. Myspace is indeed a huge network, but not entirely loved by the majority of our globe's population. True, they were one of the firsts out there to introduce music to the social networking scene, not primarily selling it, but providing the platform for bands and artists to reach their audiences. Still, Facebook is making up serious ground on the topic, and they have the added bonus of still being liked. Generally. Starting something like this on Facebook would really be quite interesting, especially in the way they might decide to implement it.
Still, for South Africans this is generally a non-issue. I don't think many people here buy through Itunes to begin with since us locals are yet to be able to obtain an Itunes account. Itunes services do not extend to South Africa. Yet. Myspace in their roll out will also favour the USA for the time being. Whoever opens up their services to South Africa first should gain quite a lead in the market over the slower service, as I think many South Africans will rush into the very first service coming available.
What Myspace does have going for it, is that this will probably allow the smaller not so well known bands to sell their music through the service, which should result in some interesting niche markets for the service. This will be exciting to see I think as it is often quite hard to get hold of the smaller artist's stuff.
Should the existing local online stores be worried? I don't believe so, as mentioned before, neither of these services are available locally. This gives our boys some time to come up with something really special to keep their customers should either of the giants decide to open their doors here.
