14 DAY TRIAL // Things are as messy as ever in the music streaming business yet most people are surprisingly determined in pushing forward. MySpace is now launching its Music service in the UK after being available in the US and recently in Australia and New Zealand. The free streaming service will offer millions of songs, though no exact figure was provided, and tens of thousands videos taking Spotify, which is very popular in the country, head on.
“The UK is renowned for its passionate and committed music fans, and MySpace has had a rich history with its artist community. Acts like Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen embraced MySpace from the outset, and are now synonymous with the site. I’m thrilled to announce MySpace Music is now officially available to all artists and music fans in the UK,” MySpace Music president Courtney Hold writes.
MySpace Music will be completely free in the UK with an ad-supported revenue model. There will be ads in between songs as all the advertising will be on the site itself. Of course, this is true for most websites in the world so it's not exactly surprising. However, Spotify, which will likely be its greatest competitor in the UK, does insert audio ads between tracks in the free version of the service so this may very well be MySpace's biggest draw.
MySpace has support from all the major labels, as well as from the usual array of indie labels, but this is basically standard for any music streaming service these days. It also signed a deal with PRS for Music, an UK rights group which claims to represent some 65,000 artists in the country, and any of its members can receive royalties from the songs they have on MySpace.
Still, it probably has an up-hill battle in the UK where Spotify is pretty well entrenched. It does have a huge social network to leverage of course, but MySpace has been bleeding users in the UK just like everywhere else. Back home, in the US, there is talk that MySpace Music may be forced to drop the free service which proved unprofitable so far after pressure from the music labels, the same pressure which has delayed Spotify's launch in the US.