MySpace Music CEO Announced Tomorrow

Peter Kafka is reporting that the MySpace Music CEO is being announced tomorrow. Mike Arrington also just claimed to me that that the report is confirmed. MySpace will be announcing Courtney Holt,who’s currently the head of digital music at Viacom, as the new CEO of MySpace Music. The service which debuted only a few weeks ago (see our posting here), was without a leader.

The service has been successful as the company streamed over 1 billion songs in just the first few weeks after launch. I question what that number really mens though considering that MySpace has offered streaming music via user profiles and band profile pages for years now. This new service is focused on distributing licensed music in an ad supported environment.

Currently those songs are available via Amazon’s MP3 service. Ultimately MySpace Music appears to be a large scale experiment as music industry executives struggle to find a successful business model dues to widespread pirating and sharing of content. Earlier this week MySpace announced a partnership with Auditudewhich enables video content owners to monetize the audience-uploaded content.

Unfortunately that model cannot be as easily converted to their music service. This news also comes as rumors of a Facebook Music revival have been sprouting up. While we’ve occasionally heard chatter about Facebook speaking with music industry executives, so far it has been little more than that. We’ll keep an eye on the MySpace Music and will make updates as news occurs.

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