The Sound Of One Band Clapping

One of my biggest beefs with MySpace is that it's really nothing that new. Sure, it incorporates elements of various types of websites in a new way, but offering music from unsigned bands online has been going on since the dawn of the Internet. And selling that music has never, ever worked.

Then again, the whole iTunes + iPod equation wasn't entirely new, either -- it still, to this day, looks uncannily like EMusic's original offering in many ways -- but Steve Jobs succeeded where Gene Hoffman failed. Does MySpace have what it takes to make people actually want to buy music from these artists? It gets back to the signal to noise ratio, and how record labels actually perform an important filtering function. They just don't do it all that well anymore. If MySpace and Snocap can pull of the filtering mechanism right via the community aspects, then maybe.

While it looks like a long tail play, I don't know that it really is, because the long tail is different than a complete leveling of the distribution platform in that there has to be some compelling reason to produce the "tailable" product in the first place, and the "because I can" aesthetic just makes it harder to actually find good content. Which then helps justify the existence of the record labels this effort hopes to obliterate in the first place.