Music-Free MySpace?Music-Free MySpace?
Music lovers may soon have to emigrate en masse from MySpace. That's because the site has agreed to start blocking copyrighted music from users' pages.
Everyone--well, at least everyone except the farts in charge of labels who probably think MySpace is at the end of one of those Internet "tubes"--knows how silly this is. After all, by posting music they like, users are promoting a song or an act. For free. It's called viral marketing.
But here's something I haven't seen addressed: The individual musician's rights.
A lot of musicians have pages on MySpace for several reasons: staying connected to friends, promoting their acts, staying on top of favorite music. But if they post songs they've written or helped to write, and those songs are out on a label-distributed CD, then these individuals could get targeted by the automatic, indiscriminant filter being used by MySpace. Thus, they could get blocked from using their own music. Someone could even get booted off MySpace due to the automaton that'll be doing the filtering. So could a longtime fan of a band.
And seeing as MySpace is so popular because of the online marketing benefit (and not just because it's a teen fad, frightened parents), then MySpace risks losing these musician users. Fewer users will make the property much less valuable. MySpace then will the first victim of the Second Bubble. "Tom" will have no friends.
CommentsComments
u make this 2 confusing if it says free music 4 myspace u should be able 2 type a song and it be on your myspace not all this stupid s*#^!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The bottom line is, there will be a limit to what people can post, which goes against the raison d'etre of viral marketing--which itself is the benefit to musicians from having fans post music. Freedom of information aside, the most taciturn and IP-rabid has to see that it's better to let people feel free to spread the word about their favorite music, rather than stifle them to the point that it chokes off this whole new PR/marketing channel that costs IP-owners nothing.
I think you guys misinterpreted what's going on. They're not going to stop people or artists from putting up music on their profiles. They're just going to make sure that the real artists are the ones who decide which songs are available for download. In otherwords they're going to make sure it's Tom Petty who decides which Tom Petty songs are on MySpace, not Tom Johnson from Mammoth Falls who's uploading Highway Companion from his iTunes.