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One year ago, I wrote in this magazine about Radiohead and their decision to release their new album In Rainbows in an online, 'pay whatever you want' format: A gimmick that allowed them to evade the machinery of the entire record industry, which I described at the time as a “bloated, obsolete beast” in freefall. The major record labels continued to swim against the current in denial of their own fate, making little effort to facilitate technological development.
This year has turned out to be the worst yet for the industry. Sales decreased for the eighth straight year, with hundreds of employees laid off. The execs still employed by the bigger labels were not out in clubs scouting talent, but instead figuring out ways to buy-out their existing talent. Other bands followed Radiohead’s lead, with Nine Inch Nails garnering $750,000 in three-day online sales of Ghosts I-V, and pissing off record labels even further by releasing another album, The Slip, completely free online a couple months later. The swirl of industry uncertainty has caused other bands to do really weird things, like AC/DC selling their new album exclusively at Wal-Mart.
Now, nearly one year to the day of In Rainbows release, the record industry has finally struck back. The 'Big 4' labels: Sony/BMG, Universal, Warner, and EMI have partnered with News Corp's MySpace social networking site to form an online music store the likes of which has never been seen, purportedly. The new MySpace Music opens the major labels’ vast catalogues for digital consumption, offering free streaming of music in hopes that fans will then purchase and download the material through a linked agreement with the Amazon MP3 store. “The idea behind it was to sort of create the ultimate music experience,” says Chris DeWolfe, the site’s co-founder.
 At this point, you might be saying: “I haven’t been on MySpace since 2006. And how is this any different than the iTunes music store?”
MySpace Music separates itself from the pack by offering their MP3s in an unprotected format, allowing them to be played on any known device, whereas the iTunes Store sells copy-protected MP3s that are incompatible with non-Mac players. MySpace Music plans to let users share music through their home pages and build communal playlists. The site’s co-founder, Tom Anderson says, “It’s not the same kind of listening you do with iTunes. It’s about sharing songs with your friends and checking out what they are listening to.”
MySpace has also partnered with big-time sponsors such as McDonald's, Toyota and State Farm insurance with the hope of supplementing download sales with an ad-based revenue stream. The record labels, as equity partners in the venture, will get a chunk of the presumed revenue. This then allows them to re-explore old concepts like paying their artists royalties and rewarding them for how often their music is played - like in the radio days of old.
So I guess everybody wins. With MySpace Music, people can continue their growing habit of listening to music for free off the Internet, and the labels and artists will receive money for it. Problem solved. 
Of course, I’m being sarcastic. The existing users of MySpace don’t win. The masses may have long left the site for Facebook and other places, but unsigned and hobbyist musicians still use MySpace to share their homespun creations and gain fans. By aligning themselves with the ‘Big 4’, the site that has thrived as a hub for independent music has seemingly turned its back on the community that supports it. Indie labels so far have been shut out of the new process, unable to upload their catalogues to the site. It looks like MySpace has forsaken them to live on as a vestige for the remains of the corporate music industry.
As for the record labels, they seem to be tackling illegal downloading much like our elected leaders treat global warming: belatedly acknowledging the unpleasant facts and addressing the problems in a half-assed manner. Eight years ago, the record industry might have successfully rebounded by putting their catalogues up for digital retail, when the Internet was first making their business services obsolete and Napster was pulling in over 20 million users. The labels could have embraced the technology then, aptly acknowledging the declining need for purchasing music as a physical product.
What the labels are now failing to acknowledge is the decline of music as a product full-stop. This hits the central nerve of my cynicism toward the MySpace Music site: Its set-up, and that of the iTunes store for that matter, appear oblivious to the growing redundancy of downloading. 
In The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr writes about the rise of Internet computing, as the workload previously handled by our personal computers is increasingly shifted online. He says: “Computing is breaking out of its old beige box, machines hooked up to the Net are merging together into one giant, incredibly powerful computer - the World Wide Computer. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.”
It’s hard to imagine many people purchasing or even streaming music off MySpace Music when pretty much everything that’s ever been released on a major label can be found and instantaneously played off YouTube, with fan-made creations often serving as video accompaniment. YouTube already acts as "the biggest Internet-music catalog in the world,” one that can be accessed free of charge. This makes downloading, the industry’s scapegoat for its woes, obsolete, and the idea of paying money for it, ridiculous. It’s hard to sell people what they already have.
In ten years, our music collections have moved from shelves and CD booklets, to digital hard drives, to the possibility of no longer needing to collect it at all. Perhaps in the future there will be one, universally accessible, centralized Google-like music repository in cyberspace containing everything that has ever been recorded. Users could pay an access fee that goes to the artists and administrators (or maybe ad revenue will allow free usage). But, unfortunately for the record labels, I doubt such a thing will ever be affiliated with Rupert Murdoch.
Further reading:
Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Atlantic Monthly – July/Aug 08. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
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