The company's offering was hailed as evidence that the IPO market was still working, but its prospectus is a mixed bag. Investors who are tempted by Baidu's beaten-down stock price would be wise to take a step back.

The first batch of tech earnings discloses some trends that could play out in a sluggish economy. Firms are no longer shrugging off the credit crisis. MySpace, the wildly popular Web property owned by News Corp.

NWSis getting a second chance at fulfilling a longtime dream: Back in earlybefore the world of people over 25 years old woke up to the huge phenomenon that MySpace would be, the company talked a lot about content distribution.

But it wasn't just content as in promotional videos for movies and TV shows, and an MP3 or two uploaded by individual bands. It meant full-blown content, as in albums for sale by bands that had drawn a substantial following among the growing pool of MySpace users. MySpace, in other words, dreamed of becoming a music label.

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MySpace hit a crossroads that summer when News Corp. It could use its relationships with up-and-coming bands as leverage to become an overnight indie label, or it could continue to grow as a social-networking site.

Partly because its owner at the time, Intermix Mediahad just settled with then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office over a high-profile spyware investigationMySpace chose to go with News Corp.

In so doing, MySpace shelved its dreams of promoting and selling music. In a way, it was too bad -- click-throughs on social sites like MySpace are so low that it limits ad revenue, which could have been beefed up by music sales. Maybe it's because of the News Corp. It did start something called MySpace Records in latebut the main release was simply a compilation of MySpace success stories, most of which had signed with other labels.

More recently, however, MySpace has been conspiring to get the next best thing -- a chance to sell music from a wide array of independent music labels -- thanks to some recent partnerships. Last year, MySpace signed an alliance with Snocapa start-up created by angel investor Ron Conway and Napster NAPS founder Shawn Fanning.

The deal allows unsigned bands trade like a stock market wizard minervini pdf use Snocap's technology to upload and sell music through the bands' MySpace pages, offering them a higher cut of the revenue than they would get at most labels. MySpace and Fox Interactive took an undisclosed stake in Snocap when that deal was announced.

Through Snocap, bands can set up a virtual store and place it on different Web sites. MySpace is a logical choice for many unsigned bands, some 3 million of which already have a presence on pricing american options using lu decomposition site, which they use to keep fans up to date on concerts and news.

Unlike songs sold through Apple's iTunes shop, these MP3 songs will play on any digital music player. Of course, most of those 3 million unsigned bands will never have many sales, but MySpace has helped launch artists who have hit the big time, including My Chemical Romance, Arctic Monkeys and Fall Out Boy.

Last weekend, things got a boost from news that Snocap and MySpace are extending their partnership to embrace Merlin, a recently formed music-licensing agency set up to represent independent music labels. Merlin is a sister organization of the World Independent Network, a trade group of labels around the world, including indie champions such as Matador Records and Epigraph Records.

MySpace Faces the Music - TheStreet

Those smaller labels have been much more amenable to selling their digital wares myspace on the stock market sites like eMusic that offer DRM-free songs. By banding together, they could use sites like MySpace to generate strong digital music sales on terms more favorable to consumers and artists alike.

The major labels, already suffering from declining CD sales, might then feel pressure to adopt the same, consumer-friendly sales tactics. It remains to be seen if a trade group of independent labels can organize into a powerful voice that can reshape the rules of music retailing, or whether it will be a futile exercise in herding cats. The low-key tone of the announcement had a diffident feel to it, as if Merlin was more of a collective aspiration than a coherent battle plan.

But it's worth watching MySpace to see how and whether it capitalizes on the second chance to be a player in music retailing that Snocap and Merlin are offering.

Who knows, this may just turn MySpace into a kingmaker like MTV was in the '80s and '90s, resigning its origins as a social-networking site to a chaotic footnote in its history. Action Alerts PLUS is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. You are using an outdated browser.

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Myspace sold for $35m in spectacular fall from $12bn heyday | Technology | The Guardian

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