Farewell Myspace Music, We Knew Thee... Kind Of

According to TechCrunch the free streaming service Myspace Music will soon be heading for a pay model.

I'll be honest here, before I read this story I'd never even heard of Myspace Music and had no idea what it was. I hadn't touched my Myspace profile in years. It seems that the service is little more than a year old and, at least at first, sported some very ambitious ideas. It was to be a cross between imeem and the iTunes music store in that people could make playlists and stream any number of major label music tracks and while users could pay per download to purchase the songs the lion's share of revenue was to come from advertising. The problem lay in the fact that Myspace Music is bleeding money in the form of royalties to the major music labels and its ad revenue, due to the fact that nobody uses Myspace anymore, is not sufficient to keep the service afloat. It's hard to believe that a paid subscription model will save the offshoot as having to pay for something doesn't seem like it would attract a userbase that is already fleeing.

On the bright side, this probably won't affect the streaming on normal Myspace profiles, contrary to Prefix's misreading of the situation. Any band that wants to put their own music on the site will still be able to do so, and people will be able to listen to it for free. Really, this is the only thing that makes Myspace worthwhile at all.