Social Media

Will MySpace Music Stay Free? It’s Up To The Labels

At yesterday's TechCrunch Disrupt conference, MySpace co-presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones were interviewed about the future of the struggling social networker.


image from blogs.sfweekly.com On
falling numbers –
"We have 120 million unique visitors worldwide. US numbers have been fairly flat. Page views are down… substantially by design. MySpace used to have processes that took 10 page views that should have taken 1."

How important is music? "It’s incredibly important. The pedigree of MySpace is around musicians. Free streaming access from record labels. We’re building out all sorts of tools for musicians. Dashboards, presence management."

On reports that MySpace loose $10 million monthly on free music – "That’s not correct. The model works for us. At some point, we look at all different kinds of models. There will always be free music on MySpace… We’re constantly talking to the record labels… Right now, we’re a valuable music discovery service for them.”

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3 Comments

  1. The music has to stay free… it’s ABSOLUTELY a valuable music discovery service… and it’s only streaming. It’s not like fans can download music from myspace and put it on their iPod.
    Record labels could monetize Myspace by including buy-links for the songs in the media player. We need to encourage impulse buys from enjoying samples.

  2. Ya, I agree you can’t go from making Myspace music free to paid – that’s why there’s advertising on there. I’m still wondering if audio ads will take off…you know where they will have an ad at the beginning / end of the track so you’re forced to hear it. By the way, you CAN download tunes from Myspcae directly onto your computer – ask any teenager – they’ll tell you how to do it.

  3. Why can you not search for all artists in a particular city on MySpace? There are so many things that need to be fixed with it before people will pay to use it.

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