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Just a few years ago, when Napster wasn’t such a distant memory and free-streaming sites like Lala, Imeem and Hype Machine were in their infancy, one site ruled as the best avenue for free samples of new bands: MySpace. Sure, the site carried a certain affiliation with young people who take oddly angled pictures of themselves, but the it also held, and still holds, a huge cache of band pages ripe with free-streaming tunes.
As many social-media users flock to Facebook or Twitter, MySpace band pages still sport free music. But it looks like that might change too. According to an insider source cited on technology blog TechCrunch, “They are spending $20 million/month on streaming royalties, and that just isn’t sustainable.” MySpace Music will “almost certainly” move to a pay model, according to the post.
Perhaps the most unfortunate collateral damage in this development is inflicted upon the bands themselves. With record labels suffering, yet another quick and easy music-distribution avenue may now close, thereby intensifying a young act’s struggles just that much more.
Plus, where would we go to find more stuff like this?
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I can totally see why this would not be good but at the same time, remember what we had to do to get to new music before MySpace or just the Internet in general? Fucking read up on shit in magazines, hang out with your friends and get stoned while they show you a new record or randomly buy an album at your local record shop that you heard was really good but hadn't listened to yet...it's music man...MySpace or no MySpace.
Yes - this does hurt the smaller bands who get to freely stream their songs, but think of all the super shitty bands that evolved because of "MySpace plays", it's so horrible to think of that.
So all and all yes this sucks, because it's the future, it's technology "bro" but at the same time a lot of these super shitty bands need to be cutoff. But I'm sure their mom will take care of any of those expenses after complaining about getting the Orange AD30 instead of the Orange Rockerverb 100.