Myspace Music no home for indie artists unless labels stop blocking access

December 28, 11:54 PMChicago Indie Music ExaminerJyn Radakovits

Previous Next

3 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Chicago Indie Music Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

As the economy dwindles, the recording industry has seen their share of losses in the last decade citing mergers between the four major labels and taking actions to pull copyrighted videos of their artists off Youtube and other file sharing sites, now takes on Myspace Music- the somewhat launched new service to rival the Itunes-types.

As early as September, steps have been taken to prevent independent acts to be able to upload any materials to Myspace if the indie label was territorially owned by a major label or had such distribution, such material is blocked from being transmitted to the Myspace server- even if the rights to the song is independently owned by the band or artist, hence yet another step to screw over small acts.

As where Myspace Music has reported to The Register there has been no talks of antitrust lawsuits or complaints of injury pending against the social networking site, "Myspace Music welcomes indie artists and is not blocking content from them or other labels.  Our goal is to provide the indie community with powerful tools and monetization channels to enable them access to revenue streams previously unavailable." as of December 22nd.

While Myspace is notoriously known for a slow feed when it comes to streaming videos or music due to all the users online at the same time, other problems such as searchabilty for for songs is a little difficult at times where the search engine fails to recognize connections between bands, albums, and song titles and tends to favor a search under a title rather than a band name.

As where labels still represent almost 80% of recording artists in the US, such disconnects between labels putting the music in the hand of fans and bands willing to meet label demands, a black market of music will continue with listeners devoting more effort into searching for a way to get new tunes.

Until any deal or service begins to favor the independent artist, bands don't seem to be giving up in their efforts to deliver the goods to fans either.