MySpace Music comes to NZ

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Kiwi and Australian MySpace members can now stream more than 30 million songs from four of the world's biggest music labels when they visit the social networking site.

The free MySpace music service allows members to create playlists and share them with others, and purchase tracks and albums.

Executive director of business development Nick Love says it has signed deals with EMI Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group and digital music distribtutors IODA and The Orchard; and is in discussions with local independent labels - including one of the largest aggregators of digital music in New Zealand.

''That will bring in a large catalogue of independent music from New Zealand.''

The service allows artists to sell their music through MySpace, redirecting fans to Apple's iTunes store to purchase songs and albums.   

MySpace will share advertising revenue from the service with labels and artists, and will soon allow them to sell concert tickets and merchandise through the site, he says.

''It will be a one-stop shop for fans. We're really excited to launch. File-sharing sites have become quite infamous so a legal and free alternative should be really attractive to a broad range of music fans.''

MySpace previously allowed bands and artists to stream up to ten tracks on their MySpace pages, and fans could stream one song from their profile page.

New Zealand and Australia are the first countries after the United States to get the service.

MySpace hosts all of the songs in the US but will cache files locally to improve download times for its members in New Zealand and Australia. 

More than 440,000 New Zealanders visited MySpace in July, according to Nielsen Online figures.