MySpace Music brings unlimited online listening

Stephen Withers
Friday, 26 September 2008 11:05

Business IT - Networking

Major companies will advertise on the player page (McDonald's is one of the first to support the service, along with Sony Pictures, State Farm and Toyota), and MySpace Music will also take a cut of the concert ticket and merchandise sales that will eventually be offered through the site.

We've read that the labels have been itching to share in ticket and merchandise income that has traditionally gone to the artists, and this joint venture is an interesting way of getting their fingers in another till.

MySpace Music is linked to Amazon's MP3 store, so users can easily purchase and download songs that are not encumbered by DRM for offline use. This includes devices such as iPods and many mobile phones.

For the first year of operation, Toyota will sponsor 'Toyota Tuesdays' offering free MP3 downloads.

Since the new-look MySpace Music appears to be limited to US users (all we could get were the familiar 60-second or so song excerpts), it's hard to make specific comments. But according to early reviews from the US, the service appears to allow unlimited plays of any track in the catalogue, in any order and without interruption.

In line with MySpace's social networking background, users will be able to share playlists with each other.

There are no clues about when the new-look MySpace Music will be available outside the US. Company officials only said that "Select products including the newly designed music player will be available globally to MySpace’s more than 120 million global users".

But however popular the service is in the US where the prevailing model for ISP plans revolves around unlimited or effectively unlimited downloads, having to stream a track each time you want to listen to it may prove a stumbling block in countries where download quotas are tightly limited and excess data charges are levied.