Posted 10/26/09 at 04:10:31 PM by Bart Salisbury

Hard times come quickly for social networking sites. One minute you’re on top, popping open bottles of vintage sparkling mineral water and picking up the tab for another round of tofu burgers. The next you are head-in-hands wonder how it all went so horribly wrong. Today’s patient on the couch is MySpace, with parent company News Corp. none to pleased with what’s going on.

Jonathan Miller, who keeps the watcher’s eye on News Corp.’s Internet services, put it pretty plainly: "The thing you see in this space more than anything else is that if you don't keep innovating and moving forward, you get in trouble. You can't stop. And MySpace stopped." MySpace’s stopped and, since being number one in 2006, has been outpaced by more popular alternatives: Facebook and Twitter.

Time, again, to reinvent the wheel, according to Miller, and return to what MySpace does best: music and gaming. MySpace recently purchased the online music provider iLike. And it has announced a new music video service which will allow labels and artists to see how well their music is doing on MySpace.

To expand gaming opportunities, Miller believes MySpace must open up its system to external developers. He also hinted that some paid premium services to be in the offing.

"Everybody in the company is upset that we didn't keep going when we had the real momentum. Regaining momentum is always much harder than keeping momentum going,” Miller stated. That, and keeping an eye on your rearview mirror to see who’s about to overtake you.

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Posted 10/21/09 at 07:00:00 PM by Bart Salisbury

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is reporting that Google is about to launch a music service. There are few details available at present, and only guesses that the service will be called Google Audio, but Arrington reports that multiple sources have confirmed the launch is imminent.

What not to expect, says Arrington, is a service similar to the one Google presently has in China. This services allows users to search for songs by song, artist, or album title, and download the licensed music files for free. (Why can’t we have that here?) According to paidContent.org, the revenue stream, split with the Chinese music company Top100.cn, comes from ads.

As rumors go this one is not a big surprise: there’s some serious coin to be made in music downloads, and it would have been more of a surprise if Google didn’t make this move. However, the entrant of another heavyweight into an increasingly crowded marketplace, even without Spotify’s impending entrance, raises questions about how many will actually survive.

Update: First screenshots of Google's music service after the jump.

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