The Social

NEW YORK--"The music business discovered data only to show how bad it was getting," MySpace Music President Courtney Holt said in a talk on Tuesday morning. "The first time I was asked to get data when I was working at Universal (Music Group) was, 'How many songs are being stolen?'"

Holt was speaking at an event called the New Music Seminar, a day-long conference geared toward the artist side of the record business. The angle of the event was dealing with a paradox that has emerged in the past decade: the Internet has launched so many new channels for independent artists to emerge, but it's also become flooded with so many of them that it's not much easier for a band to make it big. And though Holt, who was the keynote speaker at the conference, talked more about his experiences as a music industry veteran than he did about his relatively new gig at MySpace, he did drop a few tidbits.

Most specifically, he talked about his faith in the unprecedented levels of data and statistics that the digital age can bring to the music industry.

"It's more interesting to me when an artist is being 'playlisted' than played," he said, adding that a very popular MySpace Music user can have as much reach and influence as a terrestrial radio station, and that MySpace wants to track exactly who those key influencers are. "The sharing of the music is, to me, a better way to understand virality and interest than just a passive play."

MySpace Music, a free streaming audio service, was launched by the News Corp.-owned social network just under a year ago, and Holt was installed as its chief early this year. News Corp. reportedly plans to convert MySpace into an "entertainment portal," now that Facebook has solidly eclipsed it in the social-networking game. MySpace has other issues, too: a recent management shuffle that installed former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta as CEO, significant layoffs, and reports that the music labels were dissatisfied with the performance of MySpace Music.

Interestingly, Holt was quick to characterize MySpace Music as an independent entity. "MySpace Music is a joint venture that was formed last year. We are an independent company that is still owned in part by MySpace, but we have our own staff," Holt explained at the New Music Seminar event. "Defining who we're really going to be as a business is helpful, and I think there's been a lot of confusion."

The Jonas Brothers totally want to add Mark Zuckerberg as a friend now.

The Jonas Brothers, that family of mop-topped teen pop-rockers who seem to be just about everywhere these days, are going to be debuting their new single on Facebook this Thursday.

They'll be performing the new song, "Paranoid," in the first of four Webcasts created with a Ustream app for the Facebook platform. Fans can access it by navigating to the band's Facebook fan page. The Jonas Brothers, who also were poster boys for the debut of the MySpace Music service, also will answer questions from fans and talk about their upcoming tour. That's at 5 p.m. PDT on Thursday; they'll host three more Webcasts on May 14, 21, and 28.

Over a million people have signed up as Jonas Brothers "fans" on the band's official Facebook page, but considering Facebook has over 200 million active users, that's a fairly small number. This promotional effort will undoubtedly shine a brighter spotlight on Facebook fan pages, which the social network has been hyping up a lot with a fresh redesign and prominent placement in the "streams" of members' home pages.

There is, however, a more significant impact to this announcement than just the synergy of one of this decade's biggest music sensations (I guess they're kind of like this generation's Hanson, right?) and one of its biggest tech sensations. "This marks the first time a U.S. musical artist is debuting a new song via a live Webcast series on their Facebook Page," a statement from Facebook read.

Yet song debuts are nothing new to the social-networking world: Debuting the stream of a new single or album on a social music site like MySpace Music, iLike, Imeem, and Last.fm (owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive) has become a regular promotional stop for artists looking to spread the buzz about new releases. Many of these services have a heavy presence on Facebook's third-party application platform, and Facebook even partnered with one of the most popular, iLike, to debut a Thievery Corporation album last year.

There have been rumors over and over again that Facebook was looking to start a music service of its own, or maybe to acquire one of the popular music apps on its platform. That hasn't come to fruition. But does this new move mean Facebook is starting to compete directly with some of the music applications that have made its platform so popular? Maybe.

We'll see when those totally dreamy Jonas Brothers show up there on Thursday.

It's been more than five months since MySpace launched MySpace Music--so how's it doing?

"Our traffic is huge," MySpace Music President Courtney Holt told CNET News in an interview. "Our usage is very high. People are doing a lot of different things with music on our platform." There are currently more than 5 million bands with music on the streaming-and-discovery music service, and more than 100 million playlists have been created, and it was a matter of days before MySpace Music hit its billionth stream.

But the service is still evolving, Holt said, and is willing to change in response to user feedback and criticism. Recently, it's improved a number of search features, tweaked its music player, and added an "activity feed" to artist pages, among other things. There are also "album pages" that not only give users a hub for purchasing albums, but which also serve as surrogate MySpace pages for artists that may not have created their own.

MySpace, acquired by News Corp. in 2005, got its start as a hub for all things independent music before it turned into the world's largest social-networking site--only to be usurped by Facebook last year. Since midway though 2008, we've seen a lot of signs that MySpace has changed its strategy to reflect a return to its music and media roots. The biggest of these, obviously, was the launch of MySpace Music, a joint venture with the major record labels.

What we can expect down the road: a do-it-yourself tool for small-time artists to add their content to MySpace Music, perhaps. More music videos, and more music-centric video programming. And more revenue streams, including merchandise and ticketing. "We're going to be doing that in a big way in the near future," Holt said. Obviously, it's a tricky business, considering the concert world is dominated by huge players like Ticketmaster and Live Nation (which have made plans to merge) and MySpace Music would invariably have to negotiate with them. "It's hard to do that (independently) because Ticketmaster, LiveNation, AEG--they've got control of venues and they're locking in tours," Holt explained.

MySpace Music, currently only available in the U.S., also has international markets on the agenda. "We don't have a timetable yet, but what I've been saying is we're trying to launch mid-year, and we're trying to pick key markets now and we're doing the work to prepare for that," Holt said.

Recently, digital music in the U.K. has been in the news because of disputes between Google's YouTube and PRS For Music, the country's royalty collection group. Holt said that MySpace Music has already started talks with PRS. "I met with PRS when I was in Europe and we're hoping to form a deal with them...we'd like to get a deal done and be in-market when it makes sense."

Regulations and potential legal spats aside, there are plenty of competitors to MySpace Music--Imeem, Apple's iTunes, and Last.fm (owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive) all compete in one way or another. But the real nemesis would be a music offering from Facebook, the social network that snuck up from behind to surpass MySpace in global traffic. That's a rumor that's arisen from time to time and refuses to go away.

"I don't know what they're doing," Holt said on the prospect of a Facebook music service, "and I don't have a comment on it."

When MySpace launched its MySpace Music service, a joint venture with all the major record labels, in September, it was subject to a persistent criticism: that independent music, the original backbone of the social network's success, had been put on the back burner in favor of the hits.

But now, the News Corp.-owned MySpace has added a handful of independent music partners, both labels and distribution companies, to bring more of the indies to its catalog. As of Thursday, Nettwerk, INgrooves, Iris Distribution, RoyaltyShare, and Wind-up Entertainment have joined MySpace Music, adding "several hundred thousand" songs.

To be fair, MySpace Music has had a partnership from the start with Sony ATV, which gave it access to other indie distributors like The Orchard and Fontana.

"These important new partnerships will allow the MySpace Music community to access even more of their favorite independent music while enabling monetization opportunities for the newly licensed artists," said MySpace Music President Courtney Holt, who was hired from MTV Networks to head the streaming music service. "We are thrilled to have our new partners on board and will continue our aggressive content acquisition efforts."

MySpace has officially blocked access to embedded widgets from Project Playlist, one of the myriad start-ups that lets members create music playlists and share them with friends.

This could come across negatively because MySpace runs MySpace Music, a service that competes with Project Playlist. And that's probably why the News Corp.-owned MySpace is making it very clear that it has blocked Project Playlist because of complaints from major music labels.

"MySpace is an open platform that welcomes all developers to build rich and legitimate applications for its global community," according to a statement from the company. "We take copyright issues very seriously and our goal is to help developers build a substantial business by creating an environment that respects rights holders and protects their content."

The statement continued: "MySpace has received notices of infringement about Project Playlist at different times from several of the major music companies currently suing Project Playlist. Per our policy of taking very seriously the requests of rights holders to block access to third party sites that are believed to be infringing, we have evaluated the requests of the major music companies and determined that it is in our best interest not to allow Project Playlist widgets on MySpace, and effective immediately, we will no longer be allowing these widgets within the MySpace platform."

Indeed, Warner Music, EMI, and Universal Music Group have ongoing lawsuits against Project Playlist, which recently hired former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Owen Van Natta as its CEO. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)--itself going through a major transition as it ends legal action against individual file-sharers and is rumored to be on the verge of budget cuts--also sued Project Playlist this past spring.

The fourth major label, Sony BMG, has been negotiating with the start-up.

The labels' complaint against Project Playlist was industrywide, not restricted to MySpace. However, Facebook, hasn't blocked Project Playlist widgets. Whether that's due to Van Natta's Facebook connection (he's also an investor in Project Playlist), or to anything else, is unclear. Because litigation is involved, neither party is commenting.

In the digital music industry, 2008 really was the year of the playlist. Streaming music companies took off, and improved social-network sharing features made it easy to swap your favorite music lineups with your friends.

Despite its rampant and well-documented problems, the music industry's muscle has been what's steering the direction of the movement. For example, the two highest-profile "mixtape" start-ups, Mixwit and Muxtape, both shut down amid the threat of legal action that their young founders didn't want to handle. Meanwhile, bigger companies like Imeem and iLike, both of which have negotiated with the record labels and struck deals, have fared better--despite a number of rumors that Project Playlist wants to merge with Imeem.

As for MySpace, the labels have all invested in MySpace Music, so it's understandable that the social network would be quick to respond to its concerns.

SAN FRANCISCO--Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. thinks there is still a big place in the world for much-maligned major record labels.

"The value that we have is both on the editorial side, and on the marketing and promotion side," Bronfman said in a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday afternoon. "Those channels are getting harder, not easier." In other words, it was an argument very similar to the one that newspapers and magazines have made in justifying their place in an industry that's getting flooded by scrappy bloggers--big music labels provide the quality and experience.

Even in the face of In Rainbows, the label-ditching, revolutionary effort from Radiohead, he said he hasn't changed his mind. "There will be different models (as opposed to labels, particularly for artists or bands who have built up a long and distinguished career, whose products don't necessarily need marketing or promotion, whose editorial is going to go out unfettered, but there are very, very few of those," Bronfman insisted. "It's getting harder to build a multiyear, certainly a multidecade career, than ever before."

Bronfman shared the stage with moderator and conference host John Battelle, and co-panelist Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and CEO of MySpace. Bronfman's Warner Music Group, along with each of the other major labels, has taken a financial stake in MySpace Music, the News Corp.-owned social network's ambitious retail and streaming hub.

MySpace Music, a sponsor of the conference, distributed free CDs to attendees subtitled "The Last CD You Will Ever Get."

DeWolfe, notably less loquacious than Bronfman on the panel, said that there have already been 80 million playlists created with MySpace Music and that more than 5 million bands are on the social network. Big brand advertisers, like Toyota and McDonalds, are on board. "The obvious yardstick, long-term, for success, is profitability," DeWolfe said. "We started this business just like we started MySpace, to become profitable very quickly."

He said that MySpace Music intends to be "a full 360 model," with "download revenue streams, ringtone revenue streams, tickets, (and) merchandise."

Bronfman said that Warner Music Group is also adopting a "360" strategy in the face of a need to adopt more solid revenue streams. "Every new artist we sign, we sign now with rights in all their revenue streams: ticketing, touring, merchandising, sponsorship," Bronfman said. "We're only signing artists that way and we now have over a third of our current roster signed to 360 rights."

"360" deals rose to fame last year at Warner's expense--Madonna left the label to adopt a 360 contract with concert promoter Live Nation.

Battelle, a seasoned devil's advocate, repeatedly prodded the two into talking about Apple's iTunes, which remains the overwhelming frontrunner in digital music. Both Bronfman and DeWolfe spoke about it with a mix of reverence and dismissal.

"Apple's done a phenomenal job," Bronfman said when Battelle asked him to provide his honest opinion of the Steve Jobs-helmed company. "It's true, it's really true, what is remarkable and why you have to give them so much credit is (that) no one has managed to pull it off. No one has been able to come up with a sexy device that consumers want, that has an interface that is seamless, that hooks up with a service that gives them the content they wanted."

"I don't really think iTunes has ever been about community," DeWolfe said when asked if he was concerned about it as a competitor. "I think they're focused on selling devices, and that's why I don't think they're competitive to us."

Early on, Battelle attempted to push out some details about the widespread reports that MTV executive Courtney Holt would be joining MySpace as the head of MySpace Music. Neither DeWolfe nor Bronfman would cough anything up.

"It's actually been a difficult position to fill because there's so many variables...we're looking for someone that loves music, understands music, has been in the music industry but understands technology and understands user experience," DeWolfe said. He said they interviewed about 40 people for the job. "We've only made one offer, and we're very confident that we'll be able to make an announcement in the near future."

MySpace says that 1 billion songs have been streamed since the News Corp. social network debuted its MySpace Music service last month.

"We can confirm that we hit a milestone of one billion music streams only a few days after launching the new product," the company said in a statement, and a MySpace PR representative clarified to CNET News that the number only includes songs streamed since MySpace Music's debut. "More importantly, we are still compiling our metrics on engagement and unique users which will tell a much richer story on how positively the community is responding to the new music experience. We're excited to share more information and data as soon as it's available."

MySpace Music launched on September 24, with the catalogs of all four major record labels as well as indie music distributors encompassed by Sony ATV. The debut was accompanied by heavy promotion from big-name artists, across other Fox Interactive Media properties, and even a billboard in Times Square.

The iTunes Music Store, the biggest name in digital music, hit the five-billion-songs mark in June after over five years in business. But it's not really comparable to MySpace Music, because iTunes is a software download rather than Web-based, and charges 99 cents per song. MySpace Music streaming is free.

Let's do some simple math: if MySpace has about 120 million members worldwide, that's slightly over eight songs per member. Obviously, not all MySpace users have streamed any music, and there are probably quite a few who have streamed far more than eight songs. That's also a rough estimate, considering you do not have to be a MySpace member to stream songs--any visitor to, say, the Jonas Brothers' MySpace page could simply hit the "play" button.

But a billion is still a big number--and CNET News is waiting to hear from some third-party analysts and research firms to see if anyone has a different take on it.

Imeem, the social music site that was thriving on user-created playlists before MySpace Music turned it into an industry trend, has announced a handful of tweaks and updates that users will be seeing soon.

Among them are a slightly redesigned homepage with featured music and video clips, a "browse" page to look at top song, artist, and genre charts, a "discover" feature that recommends music based on past history (seems like everybody's doing that these days), and individual "artist" pages that aggregate all of that artist's songs into a single place.

For Imeem, which has been subject to nagging user-interface complaints, this is a way to get the site focused and organized. "After all of that activity earlier this year, we had time to take a deep breath," Imeem vice president of marketing Matt Graves said to CNET News. Indeed, in the past year the company has acquired retail service Snocap and streaming site Anywhere.fm, and completed its array of licensing deals with all four major record labels.

And what does the company think of MySpace Music, which debuted in September? "We think that the combination of playlists in music and social networking is pretty powerful, and we've been doing it for two years," Graves said. But he took a few potshots, too, most notably at the fact that some indie artists have complained that MySpace Music focuses too much on the big guys. "We think that there are some things that are important in terms of what you offer. Indie music is a big part of what we do."

Plus, he said, Imeem offers more freedom. Its playlists are embeddable all over the Web, whereas MySpace Music's are restricted to user profiles and have some limits on length. "Given something that's locked in a profile or locked in their universe, or something that you can take anywhere, we think consumers see great value in something they can take anywhere," Graves said.

Imeem is, on the other hand, still much smaller than MySpace, with 28 million users as opposed to well over 100 million. But it's growing fast, Graves added: a year ago it was at only 10 million users.

Apologies for the poor camera-phone quality.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy)

NEW YORK--Spotted, Gossip Girl-style: Teen pop sensations the Jonas Brothers, heralding the launch of MySpace Music atop a billboard in Times Square. The launch of the News Corp.-owned social network's music service is coming any day now.

The Jonas Brothers display can be seen on the billboard on the corner of West 43rd Street, with the slogan "Songs We Can Agree On" and a short list of songs in the manner of a mixtape (which include selections from Elvis Costello, Prince, and Albert Hammond Jr.) That's a hint at the playlist-creation focus of the new music service. A URL for the Jonas Brothers' MySpace page accompanies the ad, indicating that high-profile artists will likely be pimping the service when it debuts.

Playlists and "digital mixtapes" are hot: we've seen this recently in the iLike developer API and the popular-but-shuttered start-up Muxtape.

MySpace Music will be launching with either three or all four of the major music labels onboard, depending on which sources are asked. It'll offer paid downloads as well as free streaming and concert tickets. And, presumably, it has the approval of the doe-eyed Jonas Brothers, or at least their publicist.