A Copyfighter’s Musings

Congrats, Snocap – you finally matter, potentially in quite a significant way.  Apparently, Snocap will help 3 million unsigned on MySpace sell their songs in MP3 format.  The bands will be able to sell the songs from their own pages as well as on fan pages, using fan-to-fan recommendations to drive sales.

A month ago, I pointed out Snocap’s interesting new Linx/MyStore service, a move away from touting their vaporware P2P filtering.  The other (and the truly important) half of Snocap’s business model had always been their potential function as a rights clearinghouse.  I’ve briefly discussed the importance of efficient rights clearance on this blog before, and Snocap aimed to clear the rights thicket by creating a one stop shop for music distribution licensing. Their “digital registry” could help connect labels and artists — whether on major labels, indies or unsigned — with individuals and businesses that want to redistribute the music in myriad ways, beyond and including P2P.

Connecting unsigned bands and the millions of MySpace users is one potentially important use.  These bands have to go through an intermediary like cdbaby to get into iTunes (not so bad), they get no flexibility in price or DRM (much more problematic) and even then iTunes wouldn’t do a great job of feeding fans to them (more problematic still). MySpace provides a great alternative avenue, at least with the audience it happens to have at present.

Moreover, MySpace is a ready-made medium to take advantage of fan-to-fan taste sharing.  Jupiter’s recent research supports MySpace’s particular viability here.

Filed by Derek Slater at 10:54 pm under General news
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