by Duke

Sometimes I wonder if News Corp’s Head Honcho wakes up every morning and decides in which foot he’ll shoot himself.

Announcements are popping up all over my favorite blogs about MySpace’s revolutionary idea for making the company profitable: charge money for streaming. While this works for some, it fails to address the central problem facing MySpace – namely, that an ever-growing number of users think it sucks. For a better explanation, seen Andrew Dubber’s article on the subject of what they’ve been doing versus what they *could* do..

As my boss never tires of pointing out, “The only way to really draw users to your site is quality content.” Not only that, but your service really needs to be evidently better than the alternatives.

MySpace – while tenacious in terms of defying predictions of its demise – has not exactly been a leader of innovation for a few years now. They’ve got the content (nearly every band on the planet) and the brand power (who hasn’t heard of it?). All they need now is some real innovation to improve the service for clients (those same bands) and bring the fans back.

They were so close with the Google Music deal too. Teaming up with the undisputed leader in making money off free stuff was the smartest thing the MySpace brass have done since the site’s inception.

This could just be a case of diversification. Maybe it’s actually smart to charge for the direct streaming on MySpace while licensing Google to give it away for free.

Guess we’ll just have to see how this plays out.

See also TechCrunch’s article
Would You Pay for MySpace?
and Jesse Cannon’s take

Technorati Tags: Google, money, musformation, myspace, streaming, techcrunch

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