• Wired, Thursday, April 2, 2009 11:30 AM

Ad-supported MySpace Music "was supposed to herald a new era" for digital music, but it hasn't worked out that way, says Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk. "Though far from a misbegotten roll-out," he says, "the brief history of MySpace Music is a tale of missed opportunities, silo mentalities and unwarranted reluctance to trust the audience."

MySpace Music CEO Courtney Holt, who took charge of the site in January, admits to many of the service's shortcomings. "It was plumbing and a playlist," Holt says. "But it wasn't overly social, it wasn't deep enough, and we didn't really empower the users to do what they wanted to do." Indeed, one of the first problems with the service was actually finding it. As pundit Bob Lefsetz wrote: "They tell me you can stream everything on MySpace...but I can't find the tracks on MySpace. The company's roots, which are based in raping and pillaging for profit, have hindered the enterprise's development."

Meanwhile, once you found the service, Van Buskirk gripes, it wasn't easy to make or share playlists. "The problem was classic disconnect: A lot of thought had been given to the business model (high-end brands were delighted to be able sponsor on-demand music and playlists) but very little to how people would want to use the service." Van Buskirk follows up with a series of suggestions about how MySpace can make MySpace Music better.

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