TheWayoftheWeb

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the new Myspace Music store will pose a threat to the Itunes and Ipod Applopoly. But I’m a little surprised by Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel being so ready to dismiss the threat to streaming music services.

The growth and success of Itunes, added to the image of Apple products and services, gives it a fairly secure position at the moment, and it would take something pretty revolutionary to overturn that. Certainly I’ve encountered enough people who have lost music collections from Ipods yet won’t switch to an alternative to realise Apple devotion works across all their products and services. And enough alternatives exist, even including supermarkets.

However, plenty of people already use Myspace to listen to individual tracks by their favourite artists, and offering a streaming radio service without limitations would make this option extremely attractive. And would seriously threaten several services.

I recently heard a stat regarding Last.fm which is pretty believable. Apparently just 25% of Last.fm users actually visit the website, with most using the ’scrobbling’ tracking software, and possibly the downloadable radio player. It makes sense as the Last.fm site is hobbled by 30 second clips, and limits on the amount of times you can listen to individual tracks by specific artists. And although it does a reasonable job of finding similar artists, it won’t let you play the specific inspiration before sending you round the houses, which leaves the similar artists without any context. The arrival of Myspace could push Last.fm to concentrate on scrobbling and displaying widgets, which will either lead to new and interesting revenue streams, or could put a real chokehold on the traditional display advertising on the website.

Meanwhile Pandora.com is still on a U.S only lock down. And when you’ve taken something away from users, it puts you in a far worse position than when you’re launching for the first time. There’s no news on any re-opening to non-American markets, and in the meantime, along comes a site already extremely popular, and proposing free music streaming. Suddenly the non-U.S. world forgets Pandora exists. That’s going to limit expansion!

And then you have a myriad of small rival streaming services, like Meemix, which has a plethora of great add-ons and ideas around their music service - but has a corresponding amount of niggles and flaws, as if the ideas exceeded the ability to deliver in a simple and user friendly way.

Myspace can be far from user friendly - but enough people are already familiar with it and accept the problems to mean they’ll jumping all over new music options. And various research shows that the early adopters who jumped ship to Facebook etc are likely to still have a Myspace profile and pop in occasionally, so a fair few profiles could be fired up again to explore a new music option.

At the end of the day, it could be really good news for consumers, as Myspace plans to offer DRM free downloads (possibly pressuring others to follow suit), and it could prompt some serious thoughts about giving more value to users in the streaming market, and some serious attempts to differentiate and move ahead. It’s not often I praise and support Myspace, but for once their plans have my vote.