RantsAndRaves

In the December 4, 2007 edition of the New York Times, I read an article entitled “MySpace to Showcase Music And Sell Performance Videos.” This article talked about a new initiative from MySpace, a social networking site on the Internet. The popular site now plans to sell music to its users.

MySpace is not new to the music industry. In fact, MySpace Music has been a large part of the site’s traffic. MySpace Music allows users to view artists’ MySpace pages and listen to some of their music, but not view any of their performances. In the past, this has all been done for free. The only exception was that for users to buy the music and listen to it while not on MySpace, but this required the users to purchase the music for a small cost. MySpace plans to leave this part of the site as it is, and this portion of the site where users listen to music while online will still be free.

The new idea for MySpace is something called Transmissions. Take a look at the series on MTV called “Unplugged” for a good idea on what Transmissions will look like. Instead of top-of-the-chart singles, Transmissions will show artists in private music sessions. If MySpace likes the music that the artist shows in Transmissions, it can decide to sell it to consumers. Unlike iTunes, which sells all of its music for a flat rate of 99 cents per song, Transmissions will allow artists to set their own prices for the music that will be sold on it. Each artist will negotiate a different deal with MySpace to determine how the revenue will work. For example, artist James Blunt will keep all revenues from the songs sold on MySpace.

After reading this article, my thoughts about MySpace were just reaffirmed. I have long thought that Facebook, not MySpace, was the best social networking site because I believe that Facebook’s main importance is on the aspect of social networking. While there are other things that one can do on Facebook, everything is centered around the whole aspect of social networking. MySpace, on the other hand, does not appear to be as concerned about social networking. Instead, the site seems more like a place where one can display information about themselves and not really network too much. Now they introduce this music idea. Social networking just seems to be one of the many things to do on MySpace, not the main thing to do on the site. Facebook’s applications and other items may not be totally about social networking, but one can tell by just looking at a Facebook page that social networking is the site’s number one priority.

I also thought about something else that was interesting concerning this article. In our class, we read about Danah Boyd. One of the many things that she researched was a potential economic disparity between those who use MySpace and those who use Facebook. She found that those in a lower economic class are more likely to use MySpace, while those who are more affluent tend to gravitate towards Facebook. If this is true, I have to wonder why MySpace would be trying to earn more of a profit from their website. Facebook makes a profit, but they do so through advertisements. The only thing that Facebook uses as a revenue stream is by offering users to send online “gifts” to one another, but this is a very small money-maker.