by SHANE SINNOTT

There’s been a lot of hullabaloo the past couple weeks over this MySpace Music (music.myspace.com), which launched Sept. 24. It’s a move people had been waiting for a long time—MySpace, at least within a certain demographic, is used almost exclusively for streaming songs of opening bands you’ve never heard of, to decide whether you’re going to go to a show early enough to catch them. So MySpace Music launches, and it looks real good on paper—120 million members can create playlists and share them, and stream all the songs in the catalogue, for 100 per cent free. If you want to download them to your iPod, you have to buy ’em through Amazon.com. All four majors pony up a combined 40 per cent stake to create a massive catalogue, and then… they leave out the independents.

MySpace, in its wisdom, bites the hand that feeds, and launches without a deal with Merlin (www.merlinnetwork.org), the group that represents almost all of the independent labels. More than almost any other Web site, MySpace owes a debt to independent artists, who made it hugely popular by using it as a de facto Internet home base. The idea of MySpace officially launching a music site without them is bizarre. It turns MySpace Music into little more than online commercial radio. I hope it fails, and miserably—but they hit over one billion music streams within the first 10 days of launching.

By the time you read this, a conservative majority (ugh!) might be in power. If so, I want you to take heed of this statement in their official platform: “A re-elected Conservative Government led by Stephen Harper will reintroduce federal copyright legislation that strikes the appropriate balance among the rights of musicians, artists, programmers and other creators and brings Canada’s intellectual property protection in line with that of other industrialized countries, but also protects consumers who want to access copyright works for their personal use. We will also introduce tougher laws on counterfeiting and piracy and give our customs and law enforcement services the resources to enforce them.”

That’s party platform speak for “Bill C-61 is coming back,” with among other things a $500 fine-per-song download law. You are hereby warned.