MySpace Adds Indie Tunes

A month after irking indie fans by launching its online music service mostly with major labels, MySpace Music is set to double its catalogue of indie tunes.

In an agreement announced Thursday, the San Francisco-based Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) — a digital distributor of tunes for several thousand labels — will make its library of more than 1 million tracks available through MySpace Music.

IODA founder and Chief Executive Kevin Arnold said he expects songs from its catalog to start showing up through MySpace Music in December. IODA's catalog includes tunes from soul group Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

The distributor's tracks will join several million songs that are available for MySpace's roughly 120 million users to hear for free on the site.

Of these songs, about 1.3 million come from one independent music distributor, The Orchard, while most of the rest are from the major labels: Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Inc., Universal Music Group and EMI Music. Those labels have an ownership stake in the service, which gets its revenue from ads on the site and the sale of songs through Amazon.com Inc.'s MP3 downloading service.

Other independent labels have been upset at being left out of the launch of MySpace Music. They also have pointed out that if they were to join the service, the major labels that own a slice of it would profit from the independent labels' success.

Arnold is a board member of one group that that expressed disappointment — London-based music rights licensing agency Merlin, which represents more than 12,000 independent labels.

Arnold said IODA had been talking to MySpace for months about becoming part of the music service. There is "definitely some discomfort" in the independent music community about the major labels' equity stake in MySpace Music, he said, and his group generally shares that concern.

Still, "it's also much more important for us to really find a strong deal that's going to make our labels money now," he said.

Frank Hajdu, executive director of MySpace Music, said the service is trying to bring in as much content as quickly and efficiently as possible.

"Many, many services that have been launched, they build their content catalogs out over time. If you wait indefinitely, you'll never launch," he said.

Hajdu said MySpace Music is continuing to talk with Merlin and independent music distributors about adding their content.