Can MySpace rival iTunes with MyTunes?
It was announced last week that MySpace would begin selling some of its music on a download service to potentially rival iTunes.
Though there’s not much solid detail on this yet, it’s not that unexpected and could be one of the few iTunes-toppling attempts that might work – or at least create a serious dent in their market share.
We all know MySpace and music go very nicely together – with 3 million unsigned bands online – and we also know that the owner of MySpace – News International – has just a little bit of cash to throw at the project.
There’s an air of rumour about some of the missing details, but it’s believed that there are talks going on between MySpace and labels such as EMI.
In terms of independent artists, they will be able to set a price to sell their music on the MySpace site. Music tracks will be in unprotected MP3 format.
Whilst there’s plenty of people that would like to take a bite of the online music cherry, the big guns would seem to have the best chance of taking significant ground, particularly by offering differing models. Last week it was SpiralFrog from Universal Music, offering totally free, ad-supported song downloads.
What MySpace has over iTunes is oodles of existing community – a community that has helped push previously unknown bands into the limelight. Though there’s no details of an exact model, timings or availability of a MyTunes service yet, it could be big.
What do you think? Could this be a hit?
