MySpace Music Bridges The Indie Gap With IODA Deal

MySpace Music has overcome a major hurdle in their bid to become a competitor to iTunes, inking a deal with indie conglomerate IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance. IODA is home to hundreds of indie labels and will help expand the MySpace Music catalog by over one million songs. IODA houses labels like Arts & Crafts, Absolutely Kosher, Fat Cat Records and Rounder Records. While MySpace launched their music service with the support of all four major labels, the indies lamented that there was no deal in place to provide their rosters' artists to the service. The deal also puts to rest all those anti-trust allegations the indies were laying on MySpace Music when it launched. Financial terms of the IODA deal were not disclosed.

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• MySpace Music Launches After EMI Signs On
• MySpace Music Already Facing Anti-Trust Allegations

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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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