One month after launching their MySpace Music streaming service, the company has announced a new deal that will double the amount of indie music available through the service.
The deal, with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), will add more than 1 million tracks from over 3000 indie labels to MySpace Music.
IODA founder and Chief Executive Kevin Arnold added that the songs will be added to the service in December.
MySpace music currently has several million tracks available to its 120 million users from the Big 4 labels as well as independent music distributor, The Orchard, whose catalog is over 1.3 million tracks.
Frank Hajdu, executive director of MySpace Music, noted that it was looking to add as much content as possible, as 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 added.
Hadju also noted that it was still in talks with the largest independent distributor, Merlin, who is in charge of digital distribution for over 15,000 labels.
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Toshiba and SanDisk have been in a number of joint ventures for some time now, but it looks like the two companies are now starting what could be a more drawn out break-up process, with SanDisk announcing today that it’s selling 30% of its manufacturing capacity outright to Toshiba in a $1 billion deal. For the time being at least, the two will remain 50/50 partners in the remaining 70% of the companies’ joint factories, though Toshiba will apparently get 65% of the production capacity at those factories. As MarketWatch points out, this latest move comes just a month after SanDisk rejected a $6 billion buyout offer from Samsung, and some analysts are now speculating that Toshiba’s deal will only make the company a more attractive target for Samsung. Nothing is expected to get wrapped up before August of 2009, however, which is when Samsung’s current royalty arrangement with SanDisk is due to expire.
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Google’s Maile Ohye concluded Link Week with a tutorial on inbound links. It says basically what SEO experts have been saying for years: content and inbound links are most important, and in that order.
Just because it’s old news doesn’t mean it’s bad news. Google’s had a real history of silence on the SEO side of things, and experts were often left to theorize and test—and worse, try to game. Google sent a pretty loud signal this time last year by hitting the PageRanks of paid directories, a move seeming to confirm basic white-hat SEO tactics.
In her post, Ohye extols the virtues of naturally gained, editorial inbound links and directly denounces links appear “spammy,” or not “merit-based.”
“One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.
“Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”
Ohye then offered four bullet points on how to earn merit-based links, paraphrased below:
- Start a site-related blog, writing or video, research or entertainment.
- Be interesting. Be a teacher. (Hey, that should be a recruitment slogan for a College of Education somewhere! I’ll sell it to ya for the bargain price of $500,000—if a private school, just $10,000, since as a non-government institution you can’t just print the money you need.)
- Participate in the community surrounding your industry—social media, blog comments, user reviews.
- Provide useful products or services.
In short: content, content, content, a little participation, and the links will come.
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