Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

After having quite a lot of trouble with the music industry over unauthorized songs from U2 and Jay-Z being discovered at MySpace; it appears founders, Chris De Wolfe and Tom Anderson appears to have struck negotiations with the music industry.

Talks have been underway since August with the most prominent people in the music industry including Jimmy Iovine from UMG. And it appears that the meeting might very well have triggered some positive changes and MySpace offering free music to its users stands a witness to this as DeWolfe tells Fortune:

Users will be able to visit the pages of major label artists and click on the songs they like as they listen. Then they’ll be able to create playlists on their own pages made up of those tracks: There will be a button that says, FOR THE FULL CATALOG, CLICK HERE…

The purpose of doing so is to let users have their MySpace pages personalized with custom playlists; something different from the usual they do, visiting various music stores and then coming out with music they were looking for. At MySpace they will experience something different, socializing while the music plays on in the back ground. DeWolfe puts it by adding:

They go to iTunes because they just want to get the songs and get out. MySpace is different. It’s like going to your friend’s house, and they have cool music playing in the background that makes the experience that much better.

It adds another dimension to music discovery, shifting the medium from the traditional media to the modern social networks; making it much quicker and far more global in reach. Users can discover songs, buy them and have them shift to their iTunes or the Windows player. The service is the creation of Amazon and it offers more to both parties, MySpace with its userbase that expands to millions, makes it an important portal to music discovery.

Why would Amazon be excited about it? The alliance is set to increase Amazon’s share in the download market for music; which is already the number two digital music retailer.

What this offers to the music industry is the much needed alternative for music sales; given the 20% decline in CD sales (graph on right; courtesy RIAA) and the lack of marketing in Digital sales, the loss that totaled to $2 billion couldn’t be compensated for. The current deal can very well open up new frontiers for the Digital sales of Music.

The idea had been brewing in the heads of DeWolfe and Anderson and making money off the huge audience that’s a die hard fan of music appears very promising. And DeWolfe appears highly optimistic terming MySpace to do something for the Music industry in the present; the same that MTV had done in the last two decades.