One month after launching their MySpace Music streaming service, the company has announced a new deal that will double the amount of indie music available through the service.
The deal, with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), will add more than 1 million tracks from over 3000 indie labels to MySpace Music.
IODA founder and Chief Executive Kevin Arnold added that the songs will be added to the service in December.
MySpace music currently has several million tracks available to its 120 million users from the Big 4 labels as well as independent music distributor, The Orchard, whose catalog is over 1.3 million tracks.
Frank Hajdu, executive director of MySpace Music, noted that it was looking to add as much content as possible, as efficiently as possible.
“Many, many services that have been launched, they build their content catalogs out over time. If you wait indefinitely, you’ll never launch,” he added.
Hadju also noted that it was still in talks with the largest independent distributor, Merlin, who is in charge of digital distribution for over 15,000 labels.
Result for: indie music
If the indie music collective group Merlin has its way, then smaller music labels could be getting better deals for their content on iTunes and other legal online music stores in the near future.
The group has recently opened up signups and now has 12,000 labels supporting its cause for better conditions for their artists.
The labels under Merlin hope to “both speed up negotiations for licensing and posting music at online stores as well as to secure better deals.” The group feels that a larger representative will most “likely secure better royalty terms and use rights than by themselves.”
According to the report, deals are in the making with “existing music services” including the not-yet opened MySpace Music and the market leader iTunes.
