MySpace to turn its pages into music-selling portals

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Apr 4, 2008 by Associated Press

LOS ANGELES -- MySpace, which has lured millions of big acts and garage bands alike to build profiles on the popular social networking hub to attract fans, said Thursday it will turn those pages into portals for selling music, merchandise and more.

Helping back the new MySpace Music are three of the biggest recording companies -- Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Corp.

Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed, but each of the music companies will receive an unspecified equity stake in the new company, said Chris DeWolfe, MySpace co-founder and chief executive.

MySpace Music, which will roll out gradually in coming months, will enable artists to sell music downloads, concert tickets and merchandise such as T-shirts through their profile pages and to offer ringtones through a unit of MySpace parent News Corp. Fans also will be able to stream audio and video for free through musical artists' profile pages.

DeWolfe said some tracks will be sold without copy-protection safeguards but noted that the major labels had committed only to experimenting with offering content in an unrestricted format.

Selling music without the copy protections that make such tracks incompatible with Apple Inc.'s iPod music players could place MySpace Music in direct competition with existing digital music stores such as Apple's iTunes, Amazon.com, Napster Inc. and others, analysts said.