Meet The New Boss

MySpace has made its first big mistake. It’s acted like a Murdoch company. Having made a deal with digital music distribution company Snocap, it is booting off all other widgets and competing companies. It is telling its customers what they can do.

Controlling the channel of distribution is the traditional media company position and while it may make commercial sense it is anathema to many of the musicians who populate MySpace. Anyone following the woes of the music industry will be aware that many new artists have made conscious decisions to avoid major music labels because they wish to maintain control over what they do. MySpace is a key promotional outlet. For some, it’s also a sales outlet and the companies and software they use have been of their choosing. No longer.

MySpace has done this at a time when its most popular customer is making the transition to music-selling musician. Tila Tequila has amassed 1.2 million MySpace friends and recently attracted considerable publicity – for a MySpacer – when she released a download-only single through both iTunes and her MySpace page. The latter used a widget known as the Hoooka, supplied by the company indie911. The application can be placed on any web page and revenues are distributed between indie911, the artist, and any third-party distributing fans.

In a blog on her web site, Tequila noted, "MySpace recently asked me to take down all of the things on my page that don't involve just MySpace...I just want to express how I am feeling right now about MySpace and I am sad to say that I am pretty bummed out about all the changes. If MySpace decides to delete my page due to me having other cool stuff up such as my Hoooka feature, or other embedded videos that I have recorded...then so be it. I'm just really bummed how everything has changed so much."

MySpace has been reviewing third-party widgets and their removal suggests a rationalization to ease technical issues and increase revenue. This may not prove easy. I recently tried to purchase tracks using Snocap and it couldn’t recognize I was entering a postcode instead of a zip code. What luck someone from Greece or Australia? Having been frustrated once I’m not inclined to try again – if it’s ‘buggy’ how many others will try again? If it only recognizes Americans it’s cutting off a significant marketplace.

While rationalisation may not bother the older generation that has increasingly populated the site over the past year, freedom and immunity from control is what makes social nets compelling for younger members. Rationalisation also goes against the grain of Web 2.0, of which MySpace is a poster boy. One of its great virtues is imbedding widgets, videos and mini-apps into pages. Do you think YouTube would attract a billion-dollar lawsuit if it wasn’t so easy to put their videos on virtually any page on the Internet?

Any musician watching how MySpace has treated Tila Tequila will be thinking there’s not much difference between them and major record labels. Any smart social net should now be marketing their presence as a place where musicians can control their careers as they see fit. Murdoch paid $600 million in large part because of all those people; what’s their value if they migrate somewhere else?
Rock fans will recognize this blog’s title as a lyric from The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. The full lyric is ‘Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss.’