If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Be sure to enter your band in our Socially Awesome Band of the Week contest and thanks for visiting!

At least that’s my take on the new MySpace music site reported to be taking shape in the New York Times yesterday.

According to the NYT:

Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends. They will also be able to download tracks to play on their mobile devices, putting the new site in competition with similar services like Apple, Amazon and eMusic.

The article goes on to recognize that MySpace is good at a couple of things (bringing fans together to share and discover music being one of them) but that it hasn’t had a glowing history when it comes to selling stuff. They refer to the 2006 MySpace/Snocap music download experience as a ‘failure’ (Mat Ingram exlpains…) .

Nonetheless, three of the four majors (Universal, Sony & BMG; EMI is sitting things out for the time being) are hot to trot with this and see potential for downstream sales of tickets, t-shirts and other merchandise as well as a subscription based music service.

So how does this screw indie artists? I guess it’s not clear yet that it does. But I’m willing to bet that if the majors are looking to put their full weight behind the MySpace community, there’s going to be a lot more clutter and noise for independent artists to cut through on MySpace. Whereas MySpace was once a place for independents to go to get a leg up on major labels, now MySpace and major labels are one and the same.

My question: if the majors get to share ad revenue with MySpace for this service, will there be a similar revenue sharing offered to indie artists?