Another music move: MySpace adds charts

In the wake of acquiring smaller digital music services iLike--and now, it looks like, Imeem--MySpace continues to attempt to align itself as the foremost player in the digital music industry. On Wednesday, the News Corp. division rolled out a music charts page to track the most popular music getting listened to on the social site.

It's fairly self-explanatory. There's a prominent "movers" section featuring artists that have seen an uptick in activity recently, and music can be filtered by genre, country, and label category (indie, unsigned, or major). Then there are links to "friend" an artist, buy songs, and watch music videos on MySpace's recently launched music video portal.

(Credit: MySpace)

The design, regrettably, isn't very user-friendly and requires quite a bit of scrolling. And in a world of finely tuned "music discovery" and personalized recommendations, charts can seem a little bit static. A blog post from MySpace Music head Courtney Holt assures that it's "just the beginning of a product and platform evolution that reinforces the key messaging, vision and direction of the new MySpace Music."

MySpace launched its music service last year as a joint venture with major and independent record labels, and has received a mixed response as the industry continues to grapple with the fact that no non-iTunes digital music service has proven to be a huge moneymaker yet.