Well wow, OK I am NOT someone up in the music food chain! LOL And I DO NOT work for a label. [bigger LOL]
I am a composer for TV and Film and I sign up anonymously at first on these forums to see how it all works and to see what the users here are all about. I'm not sure 'knowing' who Kevin is let's me take his point with any more or less weight. A good idea is like a good song. If it's working, fine. So for now even if some don't want to take my posts seriously here's my 2¢ rant. Let the fire begin:

My wife has a band that performs locally and maintains both her own site as well as a MySpace account. She forwarded me Brian's piece to see me take. I occasionally get the chance to speak at film festivals and such about composing and more to our discussion here about licensing music for Film, and TV.

I do get a bit tired of artist and singer songwriters moaning and groaning all the time about the big bad labels and being ignored and not compensated etc. Unfortunately they do most of it to themselves. And the labels - and mind you I have not a lot of love there either - are just corporations that want to make money. And they try to find or worse make 'artists' so they can sell some sort of media and make a buck. So what.

The idea that the interests of a few on this new site will drive the nature of the site for the many may be a bad deal. To which I say don't play in that sandbox. If you are a 'free' artist then just do your art and don't worry about it. If however you want to make a living doing/creating music, art, some content of some kind - then we are going to have to figure out how to get a good deal. For one; stop giving it away. Also consider the recent buyout of YouTube. 1.5 Billion for a site that was a grass roots, user driven creation. Sound familiar. Got popular for all the same reasons we have said here that MySpace became so. It's still what it was but now there is someone really making money from the advertising. Not you and me. Just so we can go on looking at badly shot videos of guys lighting their farts on fire.

Butt seriously, the big concern is that the labels - MySpace not withstanding want to get money from the one last bastion's that emerging artists had to survive: Sales of merch and other tour related media. Without that revenue they're really running out of gas. And now even that's getting too expensive to fill up the band bus. . .

The idea that they will 'compensate' the rest of the 5 million users on MySpace music is silly. They don't have a publishing deal with you. So your out of luck. If you give it them the genie is out of the bottle. If you want some of the ad dollar revenue then you are going to have to get record deal. I'd say 'it sucks' but is it really that evil? The same would be the case if you wanted a book deal. No publisher is gong to edit publish, print, and ship your tome around to all the Barnes and Nobles if everyone can read it on line for free.

We need to just take control of our own destiny and not rely on MySpace to be the guardian of our art.