MySpace Likes iLike; Buys It by George Ziemann -- August 22, 2009 If you ever had music on mp3.com, it's probably good to know that your stuff is still out there, making money for somebody else. Trusonic was a licensing service that you could allow access to your songs from within mp3.com, purportedly to be placed in royalty-earning opportunities. (Figure 1) A few months after Universal Music shut down mp3.com, GarageBand bought Trusonic and incorporated any acts that did not opt out into their new site, iLike. This week, MySpace bought iLike, which moves everything from GarageBand, and Trusonic (which includes mp3.com material from 2002). (Figure 2) So here's the weird part... The four major labels are part-owners of MySpace Music, where one would assume all this new material is eventually headed. This will give the majors another chance to collect a bulk of the independent music, then just erase it all from the net, like Universal did with mp3.com. Why else would they buy what they already killed once? Here's an easier question: How many times do the rights to our music get re-sold before we get paid? The answer is "as many times as they feel like it." A different set of laws exist for the major labels, which have "products," than for everyone else, who are merely "seeking promotion" for their "unsigned" (aka lame) act. ASCAP would like to have you arrested for singing a Metallica song in the shower without a license. The RIAA will sue you for personal (not-for-profit) file sharing. Corporations are sharing our files for profit, buying and selling them, using them as content for their next for-profit venture. With the sale to MySpace, this includes the four primary members of the RIAA. Kind of like a Kazaa on the regular net, except this is legal because the record labels are the ones doing it. I tend to overreact to things like this. Having said that, this looks to me like the RIAA now owns the catalog of every song ever licensed to Trusonic, GarageBand, iLike, and maybe the rest of the music from mp3.com, plus the millions of acts that already had a MySpace page. They own us all.

Figure 1 Figure 2