MYSPACE NOW WANTS YOU TO PAY FOR THEIR SH*TTY MUSIC INTERFACE

Will MySpace Music users soon be asked to pay for the tunes they stream? Could be.

Metal Insider‘s Melinda Dolezal tell us that the floundering social network’s music division is considering a subscription model to help offset their plunging traffic numbers and their soon-to-expire ad deal with Google. This is stupid, stupid, stupid thinking!

If the price were right — say, $5.00 a month for unlimited streaming — maybe I’d pay for it. But the fact that there are so many other shortcomings of MySpace such as eye-bleeding page designs, a clunky interface and an overabundance of spam, I’d think bands and labels would instead look to other solutions that offer the same services to their visitors for free.

More and more emails we receive from bands have links to Bandcamp pages, and I have to say that I’m a big fan: the interface is super-simple without any bullshit or clutter, it’s fast, and it works well. From a band’s perspective, it’s easy to set up and it offers the ability to sell downloadable tracks in a variety of formats instantly.

So I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that a paid subscription model for MySpace would be its death knell. Of course the big four major labels — who all have a monetary stake in the MySpace Music venture — are going to do everything possible to push any such model to try to eek profits out of it. But it won’t work. People have come to expect streaming music for free. That’s just the way it is now.

-VN