MySpace announces music retail component

MySpace took a step over the holiday weekend to offer serious competition for established online music retailers, partnering with Snocap to offer the sale of songs directly from artists individual pages. The site already is perhaps the top go-to place for those wanting to sample music and learn more about musicians; now, thanks to this partnership, it can keep fans on the site who previously had to leave it to go purchase music.

The service allows artists to embed a mini-store right on their page, giving fans the opportunity to purchase 192 kbps mp3 tracks for 79 cents each. The band the Format offers a good example of the service, offering tracks for sale from its album Dog Problems. Visitors to the band's page can sample latest single "The Compromise," check out the video and then, if they desire, buy it and other songs with a few clicks and access to a PayPal account. More importantly, perhaps, the songs are DRM-free, which means they can be endlessly traded, burned and uploaded by fans. That puts the site somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between DRM-free sites like eMusic, which limits its offerings to indie label artists, and Apple's iTunes, which leans more heavily on mainstream, major label artists, and which sells DRM-encoded mp3s.

Snocap is the company founded by Napster founder Shawn Fanning after that company's implosion. While it touts several successes on its web site, this is the first high-profile move that puts the company in a spot similar to that enjoyed by Napster in its heyday -- all nice and legal this time, of course. And because Snocap has or is working on deals with most major labels, there would seem to be no limit to the eventual offerings on MySpace. As Rusty Rueff, Snocap CEO said in a press release announcing the deal, "Now, every artist can distribute their music instantly and directly to their fans, making them relevant whether they sell one hundred tracks, ten thousand tracks or ten million tracks."