MySpace Launches a Free-Music Revolution

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The current size of its library notwithstanding, MySpace Music does a number of things that will excite music fans — and might help the social network fight off rival Facebook, which since April has surpassed it in monthly traffic. A set of tools called MyMusic lets you create a limitless number of playlists (with as many as 100 songs on each) that you can listen to on the site or share with your buddies. Say, for instance, you're hankering for some Coldplay. Create a playlist, drag and drop all four albums, and you're good to go. The full-length songs stream at something less than CD quality (128 kilobits per sec.), but it's good enough on a computer.

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It almost goes without saying that MySpace will also happily sell you songs and albums its new service doesn't cover; the site has partnered with Amazon, which handles the transactions and sends you unlocked MP3s. Indeed, when you set up MyMusic, you can add an Amazon applet and install a music downloader (Mac and Windows are supported, I'm told) that will drop the purchased music wherever you want, including into iTunes, so you can transfer the songs to your iPod. (Songs range from 79 cents to 99 cents each.)

That's all pretty cool, but MySpace's real boon is providing people a better way to find new music. Music discovery is all the rage these days; Apple's Genius feature and Microsoft's Zune music player both rely on a computer-mediated, algorithmic approach to recommendations. MyMusic's solution is simpler, and far better, I think: it lets you know what your friends are listening to. Like Facebook, MySpace has a news feed, which figures out which of your friends interests you most and communicates their doings to you. So, if my musician brother Seth Augustus (a stage name) adds an interesting tune to his playlist, my news feed will report that. I can even subscribe to his playlists.

That said, MySpace faces some hurdles. For one thing, Seth is my only friend on MySpace; the rest of my family and all of my friends are on Facebook. It remains to be seen whether MyMusic will be enough to get them to migrate. Also, Rhapsody streams music to my home music system, Sonos, which wirelessly connects to speakers throughout my house. By comparison, the free portion of MySpace Music streams tunes only to the computer at this point. So I'll keep subscribing to Rhapsody, but I'm guessing its days — in my household, anyway — are numbered.