14 DAY TRIAL // MySpace is turning up the heat on cost savings. The social network hasn't been doing so well recently and the only part of its service to stand out or at least not get crushed by competitors is MySpace Music, the social network's joint venture with the big four music labels. But that doesn't mean it couldn’t get a little cost cutting of its own and it is now undertaking a measure that could save it more than $100 million a year by disabling auto-play on user profile pages.
Billions of songs are streamed every month on the site, adding up to a hefty sum in bandwidth costs, as much as $10 million per month, TechCrunch reports. Now it looks like the site will disable the auto-play feature, which accounted for more than one billion streams every month, which should make up for a significant reduction in bandwidth costs. Money was the biggest reason behind the decision but it also has other advantages, like providing labels with better listening stats, which are a better measurement of what the users want to listen to and how often. Another benefit, they claim, is the improved user experience.
This last part is somewhat of an understatement. Until now when a user visited an artist or a user's page the songs in the embedded MySpace media player would start playing automatically. This was annoying enough by itself but many times there would be other players or songs embedded on the page as well, some of which also had auto-play, resulting in several songs starting to play at the same time and making for some "fun time" searching for the players and stopping them all. But fret not, if you found the auto-play feature really useful, you can still opt in to have it enabled by default.
MySpace Music has been a surprising success for the social network, amidst falling user numbers and monthly visitors, with traffic numbers doubling in less than a year after launch, the music site now being at number two in the US. It should also be interesting to see how the pending iLike acquisition will affect the site as the deal is made by MySpace itself not through the joint venture.