Credit: Look at their greeedy little eyes....

So, MySpace has finally announced some of the specifics of it's deal with the majors: Sony BMG, Universal Music and Warner Music. And its stinks like a big honking donkey's cock.

Why? Because it effectively just adding a shop-front to bands' pages on MySpace. It's not innovative and it certainly doesn't add anything new. It's nothing but a big shiny way of re-iterating all the current problems the music industry faces in its approach to the digital sphere, albeit to more consumers on a more frequent basis. All this talk of monetisation, and "360 degree sales opportunities", and taking direct control of markets – it’s all just pissing in the wind. All MySpace is doing is concentrating the potential pool of music consumers in one place.

“But isn’t that enough on its own?” Well, frankly, it hasn’t been thus far. The Music Industry has moved from paralytic fear of the internet, to now somewhere swaying between autocratic despot, screaming about enforcing DRM and demanding that ISPs hand over details of potential filesharers, to almost a caricatured capitalist greedsmith, looking to wring every possible scrap of currency out of their fans. And its just not worked. The industry likes to shout “THE NEW MODEL! THE NEW MODEL IS COMING TO SAVE US ALL!”, but this fictional new business model has yet to manifest itself in any meaningful way. You can cart all your free Radiohead downloads off to the false-start shack – when you’ve got a worldwide captive audience at our fingertips, a showboating pay-what-you-want scheme can’t be taken as a blueprint for the future of the industry, no matter what any lazy journalist looking for a headline might think.

The concentration of consumers in a place where they can buy more things isn’t going to overcome the central issue that faces anyone trying to make a buck off the Web 2.0 Generation (urgh, I preferred it when we could call it the MySpace Generation) – the fact that people don’t want to pay for digital content. If people want to go to a gig, or to buy a t-shirt, then the avenues for them are already readily available – giving people the opportunity to buy music-related merchandise at the same time as their downloads is only going to create a modest amount of additional sales. If people want a t-shirt, they’ll buy one regardless; the MySpace system will generate a few impulse purchases, but nothing substantial. Moving the revenue streams of ticket sales and merchandise from one place to another isn’t going to fill the void that falling sales have created. Hell, people like Trinity Street and eTickets are allowing acts to cut out the middleman of Ticketmaster et al, and sell tickets directly to their fans through their own website, not some 3rd party.