Indie musicians now have a new way to make money online by adding their songs directly to MySpace Music in exchange for sharing in the ad revenue with the service.
The deal, announced Monday, was struck by the digital-media distribution company Tunecore, will let any artist distribute songs directly through MySpace Music starting Thursday without having to have a music label or aggregator do so on their behalf.
Artists will simply pay a small flat fee for inclusion in the on-demand MySpace Music streaming service, which is partially owned by major labels. In return, MySpace promises to pay artists a percentage of the money it makes from the ads that accompany the music.
Tunecore predicts that by the end of 2009, it will have paid out more than $30 million to independent artists, who retain 100 percent ownership of their music, and the vast majority of that sum comes from song sales.
On-demand music streaming is set to heat up in the coming year as smart phone penetration increases and MySpace Music faces more competition from Spotify and whatever Apple plans to do with its newly acquired streaming site, Lala.
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