MTV To Take on Myspace

written by: Richard Kastelein

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Published on Saturday, 17 March 2012 17:46

The NYTs is reporting that MTV looks to take on Myspace in creating a 'Grand Central Station' for artists to flock and push their audible magic via a new Internet sitecalled Artists.MTV. Interestingly appmarket.tv covered only weeks ago Myspace's move to take on MTV Over the Top (OTT) with MySpace Connected TV Apps on the slate.

Not long ago, MySpace was the central destination for online music, the place where fans could connect with seemingly every artist on earth. Since then the site’s popularity has plunged (and its new owners are trying to resuscitate it). But can anything take over from MySpace as music’s online agora?

Well, MTV believes it can.

On Thursday, at the South by Southwest festival here, Van Toffler, the veteran MTV executive who is the president of MTV Networks’ Music and Logo Group at Viacom, announced Artists.MTV, a project to let musicians “claim” and customize their pages among the thousands on MTV’s site. As Mr. Toffler explained in a meeting before his speech, the idea is to collect in one place — namely MTV.com, whose sites have 60 million unique visitors each month — some of the traffic that might go off in various directions when a fan looks for a band online.

More from Yahoo on the announcement:

One realm in which MTV has less of a foothold in is merchandising. That is why it has partnered with Topspin Media, a company that has created software that enables artists to sell music and merchandise directly to fans rather than going through Amazon or iTunes.

Artists can not only make money from selling that merchandise, but also by sharing in ad revenue form the site.

Google launched its own program for lesser known artists last year, the Artist Hub and its Magnified program.

MTV believes their new site will prove helpful to artists all across the spectrum, form the big stars to the high school garage bands.