18th
boy, does this shit sound familiar
from a Wired interview with MySpace Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfeasdf:
Wired: Is MySpace Music open to giving equity deals to digital distributors such as The Orchard or Ioda?
DeWolfe: We’re open to extending our equity deals to the right partners, but at a certain point, you can’t extend equity to everyone. What we originally set out to do was create a platform where every artist in the world would not only have a free promotional platform like they do right now — we’re providing a free service — but also to create additional revenue streams for them.
Wired: Will unsigned bands on MySpace Music have a way to participate in the ad revenue?
DeWolfe: We don’t really have the mechanism right now to develop an affiliate program or a payout structure for millions and millions of bands…. We started with the major music companies, and we’re talking to the consortiums because the indie bands are really the heart of MySpace — it’s how MySpace Music started. We value their contribution, and one of our initial missions was to help artists that didn’t get signed by major labels to create a living based on their art.
We first did that by creating this free platform where they could get fans from all over the world that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach; and provide a platform for those fans to become friends with those independent artists. And when those independent artists go on the road, they can sell out their shows and make money through touring and merchandise and tickets and all of that. We’re trying to extend those revenue streams to the independent artists. This is all meant to be a very, very positive movement for them.
Basically, in much the same way royalties are misdistributed by PROs in favor of label/established artists, money collected by MySpace in ad revenue will be bypassing indie and unsigned artists, no matter that those ads are on their pages.
With bated breath I wait for Billy Bragg’s response.
