Bringing down MySpace

I am certainly not going to suggest that the Daily Mail is in league in any way with the British music industry but I am slightly aghast to hear, from people working within the music industry, how many schemes now exist to undermine MySpace, Garageband and the plethora of other networking sites and their, now common, free exchange of musical ideas and composition. I have been (very, very reliably) informed that these schemes include promoting some ridiculous smears, ranging from pimps recruiting girls on myspace.com through to gang members using myspace.com to boast about their latest crimes. About the only one that has a ring of authenticity is the Daily Mail article which seems based upon genuine parental fears and does not, in my opinion, reflect so much upon the children as upon the stupidity of the school in question that should have been acting in loco parentis.

Few people seem to know that MySpace is owned and run by News Corp. and that Rupert Murdoch has apparently previously been shown to take a great interest in his acquisition of Intermix Media - MySpace's parent company - which he purchased last year for some US$692m. There are a number of large record companies these days quoting allofmp3.com, Limewire and MySpace.com as reasons for their financial losses - one need only to look at EMI/Virgin's recent financial statements for a start - while labels such as Ministry of Sound regularly seem to use music download sites as a reason for unnerving their staff, with threats of redundancy and paycuts due to financial loss. The music industry seems now to spend its entire time whining that myspace is giving musicians an unfair advantage over record labels ... I kid you not, I actually heard a music executive last week saying this. They seem to want the benefit of opening up newer means of selling more product, and let us not be in any doubt that the music download system via iTunes and its clones has done absolute miracles for worldwide music sales, while reserving the right to whine about how the internet is stifling their income. To me this so reeks of the book DarkNet, although the villaina of this piece are the 'sisters' (Universal, Warners, EMI/Virgin and Sony BMG) and the USA's RIAA and the UK's BPI (British Phonographic Industry) and not the book's Hollywood and the MPAA.

Perhaps, as others have pointed out, this is indeed a ham-fisted approach by those companies listed above to prevent News Corporation beginning to move into the music industry. I would hazard that Rupert Murdoch may well be seizing the music industry by its family jewels, by promoting direct networking between artists which is subject neither to agency commissions nor to contractually obligated licencing fees to their record labels. If Murdoch can indeed accomplish this as a commercial venture while not cutting off the creative digital flow between his subscribers then I do, for once, totally applaud his move and his foresight.