Indeed: my feed reader is, in fact, blowin’ up. The past 24 hours have been intense. The one thing I personally didnt see coming was the proliferation of music: buying, gifting, searching. Its all over the place.
Today, MySpace unveiled enhancements meant to appeal to consumers and content providers alike. Funny since we’ve all been reading articles that announce the continued sickly state of the MySpace platform.
Also announced yesterday, Facebook has launched a music gifting service which allows users to purchase and gift music to other users.
On top of all this, Google is rumored to have a music service of their own, allowing searches to yield downloadable purchased tracks. Tuesday, Apple began Tweeting about iTunes.
Although the music industry has been deemed dead for a very long time, it appears that by adding social and searchable attributes, music is now becoming integrated into everyday digital interactions a bit more easily. But, what does this mean for the industry itself? Will this help struggling companies or will it open up a whole new mess of problems between artists, rights owners and labels?
jesskrywosa.com 
You’ve been tearing up the Google Reader. Wowsah. Yes, it’s good to see more musical innovations in the social mediasphere. About time.
The trouble with the music industry is that they’ve been wanting to follow the gatekeeper model for so long, and ignored the demands of the market and musicians, that we’re now seeing the deluge. It was musicians — not record companies — who pushed the access model by streaming tunes live on MySpace, making whole albums available for free on the Internet, by realizing that getting their music out there, not hoarding it, was the best way to win fans.
And like in anything else, once competition begins, everyone wants in. When free is the new currency, everyone joins the gold rush.