MySpace Music Already Facing Anti-Trust Allegations

Before the service has even launched, MySpace Music is already facing possible legal woes, as anti-trust allegations have emerged. MySpace Music, a music retailer that hopes to become "the internet's MTV," will boast both the backing of its parent company News Corp and three of the four major music labels, thus encompassing about 70% of the recorded music industry. This has independent labels crying foul after being frozen out of the new site. It wouldn't be the first time the indies impeded on potential blockbuster mergers: Both Sony/BMG and Warner/EMI mergers were interfered by those menacing indies. MySpace Music does offer a service where indie labels could upload their music, but thus far labels have found themselves either unable or blocked from uploading their catalogues. Thus, the indies are asking the European Commission to look into MySpace's worldwide venture.

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• MySpace Friends Three Major Labels, Readies Launch of Music Service

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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