Spotlight on Facebook's music ambitions

2 Jun 2010

With MySpace having bought iLike and imeem, Apple likely to launch a subscription service out of Lala's ashes and Google having partnered with both iLike and Lala for music playback, the spotlight remains on Facebook and what its music ambitions might be.

In an interesting interview with BBC 6Music, MySpace's UK general manager Christopher Moser says MySpace isn't yet ready to get in to the subscription game, but, when asked what if Facebook showed an interest, said he would be "very happy" for it to do so…

"That would be great for the music industry - artists need more outlets for their music where they can make money. If Facebook wanted to enter that area, we'd be very happy."

On MySpace's struggles:-

"MySpace started as a company in 2004 - we're a fairly new company - we're only six years old." (Does that still qualify as 'new'?)

"The key question remains, how do you monetise traffic these days? This is not (just) a MySpace problem, it is a generic question around content creators. We have unlimited supply of advertising space. There's millions and millions and millions and millions of web pages, and they all sell ads. Making a business model on the internet is not easy.

"We have been very successful very early, then we have not grown our audience over the last one and a half years."

So, profiting from subscriptions?

"Music subscription is something that is definitely interesting - it's not a mass-market product at the moment, you're talking about a very tiny niche.

"These days, most people still want to own music - this thing on access to music is not a mass-market product. Do we consider moving in to that space? Of course, but when the time is right and when we really believe that there's mass-market appeal."

Until then, Moser suggested musical MySpace must open up to output to Twitter, Facebook, et al: "MySpace will have to adapt to allow artists to publish from MySpace in to any other potential platform that is out there."

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