MySpace Music Finally Pulls in Merlin’s Indie Labels
MySpace Music — not the actual music pages for bands, but the wannabe Muxtape/LaLa/Spotify service — was relegated to offering tunes from major labels (and a few indies) since its inception in 2008. However, they’d been in talks with indie label representatives Merlin to invite its member labels to the party.
Well, now they’ve officially been invited. Merlin and MySpace Music have hammered out a deal that both sides feel is fair (which probably means that MySpace Music feels is fair and Merlin feels is the least horrible — though still pretty horrible — deal they could get) that will allow users to stream member labels’ songs and include them in playlists on the service.
This might be good news for MySpace, which has been losing ground to various and sundry music and social networking services for a god while now, if that had any idea what to do with MySpace Music. Granted, they’ve done a better job getting the word out about the service, and the new song stream/search deal with Google is a plus — but I think we all know it’s only a matter of time before MySpace is Friendster.




