So, another major player could be about to launch into the download space, with news that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is planning on launching a proper download store under the MySpace banner.
According to PaidContent.org, News Corp is in talks with all four major record companies, and, as with Amazon's US download store, all of them would make their music available in the DRM-free MP3 format. Word has it News Corp would give the majors an equity stake in the download store, which would also carry advertising, meaning labels could enjoy both download sales income and a cut of ad sales.
MySpace already has an MP3 download offer, of course, through its partnership with SnoCap, though the majors have not been part of that offer, and the download function is still seen very much as an add-on to MySpace's artist social network page operation. It's not yet clear if the new download store would be a stand alone operation, or integrated within the MySpace Music artist pages, or both.
If the majors take a stake in the News Corp download platform it will be interesting to see if [a] similar equity deals are made with other download operations and [b] whether that affects Universal and SonyBMG's plans to launch their own download store.
MySpace, of course, is not quite the phenomenon it once was, with FaceBook now and still dominating the social networking space, though in terms of music pages MySpace still tends to lead the way, making an expansion of music services an obvious next step for the Murdoch owned enterprise.