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MySpace Music: Can It Stay Free? Ask The Record Labels.

6:28 p.m. · May 25, 2010 · by Bob Marshall

In case you have no idea about how the internet works (which is doubtful, because you're here), MySpace has been a slowly withering entity since Rupert Murdoch and his company News Corp. puchased the company in 2005 to the tune of $850 million. In fact, Gawker-operated website Valleywag reported yesterday that Slingshot, MySpace's sort of social networking development lab, laid off its entire staff and closed its doors on Friday.

Overall, MySpace seems like worst way possible for News Corp. to venture into to the business of online social networking. It could have instead opted to buy Facebook which, despsite building a reputation for selling users' personal information to advertisers, is by far the most popular of these kind of sites. Or there's always Twitter, the fastest growing social media site around despite the fact that it has about a quarter of the capabilites that Facebook and MySpace do.

Truly, the only reason people really even use MySpace is to listen to music for free. It's become the status quo for every band big or small to obtain and operate a MySpace page in order to allow everyone with a computer free streaming access to their songs. And, it's incredibly beneficial to these bands. First, free access is the number once incentive for anyone to listen to your songs. Second, it's an easily accessible and very standard streaming player to use. You don't even need a MySpace account to stream these songs. Finally, it evens the playing field between bands. Hire a friend with great HTML skills for a minimal fee, and the page for your local band Conductors looks more professional than an internationally known act like LCD Soundsystem.

So, what are the odds this free access to music stays around? Well, according to MySpace co-presidents Jason Hirschhom and Mike Jones at yesterday's TechCrunch Disrupt conference yesterday, it's out of the company's hands. When asked about reports that MySpace loses $10 million a month by offering free music, they denied the reports and responded, "There will always be free music on MySpace... We're constantly talking to record labels... Right now, we're a valuable music discovery service for them."

Well, unfortunately fellas, if we know anything about record labels, they HATE giving away their product for free. So, what does this response actually mean? By looking at MySpace's track record over the last five years, we can interpret it to mean, "Free music is the only thing keeping us alive. For the sake of our jobs, don't take that away from us record labels."

One final thought: Is the music really free when we have to close pop-up ads every time we try to switch tracks? If MySpace and record companies don't make money off of those, than who does?

[Hypebot]