Saturday, September 27, 2008

Part of what has made MySpace so popular is the ability for bands to create their own pages and post a song or three online, enabling fans to then grab and share those songs on their own pages, showing their allegiance and letting friends rock out when they came by to visit. That functionality got a major boost yesterday when MySpace Music added the entire discography of artists from Sony BMG, Universal, Warner, EMI, and Orchard.

Fans can browse through for their favorites and then stream entire albums through the site, still picking tracks to embed on their own pages. If they want to actually own the songs and play them offline or on a portable player, they'll need to pony up some cash, which is where the partnership with Amazon and its MP3 store comes in, with most DRM-free tracks starting at an iTunes-beating $.79. The problem, for the labels at least, is that buying tracks isn't always easy, as links to Amazon's site are quite frequently missing.

But, despite the typical MySpace glitches and random errors that some reviewers found, feedback is mostly positive. (Media blog paidContent.org even called it "an ambitious new music site not crushed under the weight of legal limitations and lawsuit avoidance.")[From: MySpaceMusic and BBC News]

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