Finally, something truly interesting in social media: MySpace plans to distribute, sans DRM and using Snocap’s technology, music from the many bands that call it their online home (Mashable calls it 3 million).
Mathew wonders whether the low (or no) profile of those bands will allow the feature to amount to anything. Agreed, but much more comes to mind as well. How much can be accomplished without the (un)natural selection performed by labels? Quite a lot, I’ll bet. There are multiple ways that the cumulative effect of the selfish instincts of MySpace community members could be mobilized to improve the efficiency of finding and commercializing new music.
It’s not hard to imagine bands ‘signing’ with MySpace to get free hosting, the technology platform, and access to the community, all in exchange for a piece of the revenue and, for those who can leverage the MySpace experience to move on to bigger things, a piece of that as well. Will this allow MySpace to insert itself into the new music discovery process – to become a farm team for the labels? If it hasn’t already, look for MySpace to sign deals with labels eager to get first dibs on whatever the MySpace model manages to develop.