(editor’s note - this is an expanded version of a comment on Techcrunch’s piece on Amazon powering MySpace Music’s backend).

With rumors swirling around the upcoming (September?) launch of MySpace’s music service, the real question is, will anyone care? As a digital distributor myself, I have yet to see evidence of high-traffic destinations actually generating sales of music downloads. Consumers seem to have a giant wall between their online entertainment and commerce destinations. A brief history:

Circa 2003/04 - PressPlay rebrands under Napster a formerly “free” consumption service. Today, Napster is the most frequently cited takeover target of digital music services.

Circa 2004 - AOL acquires MusicNow to offer download and subscriptions to the massive userbase of 20-25 MM/month music visitors. Today, Musicnow has been shuttered and Rhapsody powers the minimal revenue AOL receives from music.

Circa 2005 - Yahoo launches YMU, promising to turn traffic firehose and $6.99 price point into huge sea change for subscription business. Today, Yang can’t even afford to maintain the servers managing the DRM licenses. Another fun fact - our Yahoo revenue was the most disappointing of all - at about .00025% of iTunes for our clients.

Circa 2005/6 - MTV launches URGE. Crickets.

Today - contrast the above to retail focused sites launching services: Amazon has grown dramatically in first 9 months. Still a fraction of iTunes, but actually growing. Upstarts like AmieStreet demonstrate a real financial trend, and niche sites like Turntable Lab and Beatport servicing specialty markets with retail focus actually do business.

MySpace has yet to say anything about actual experience differentiators. You I can already stream music for free there, provided the browser doesn’t crash, and you remember to turn off the bands 15 other Reverbnation, Musicane, RockYou and NeverStopsFlashingForNoReason widgets.

A long comment, but final thoughts: with social advertising CPMs at rock bottom prices, there is little guarantee that MySpace is even demonstrating advertising value to companies to adequately cover even streaming costs of that much media.

DashGo’s statistics tracking monitors streams for bands on MySpace, Last.FM and YouTube among others. Once a band reaches a certain threshold - say around 1 million total streams, Last.fm and YouTube traffic tends to outpace MySpace, perhaps demonstrating that MySpace isn’t yet a compelling destination to consume music in the long run.

That’s the skeptic in me. But I hope they find a way to really deliver music to their users in a way that works great and is universally embraced. I hope we don’t see the Rhapsody powered MySpace music store in 15 months, as much as I like Rhapsody. Consumers need good options.

It’s hard times in the biz. Thankfully, I’m employee #1 at DashGo, and am still able to pay for food and rent. (I still steal my music) Hahaha.  In case you’re also in the music scene (”business” is barely even applicable anymore), here are some companies NOT sending a pink slip my way:

EMI

Starbucks

Napster

To be fair, none of these folks are giant DashGo customers, yet. But maybe if they wanted some sweet data on where their fans live online and which sites generate traffic, they would be.

Check out the Sick Puppies lift during DashGo’s “Pitiful” video distribution campaign:

Robert Scoble style, I’m posting another link to media containing DashGo. I was lucky to join the MyAWOL folks yesterday for a quick discussion on mobile music for their podcast. If you’ve got 30 minutes and need to know the future of mobile music from an indie artist and label perspective you can tune in at: http://myawol.podbean.com/2008/06/19/myawol-music-insider-newstalk-episode-4-mobile-media/

For more info visit DashGo.com or send an email to me at benp (at) dashgo.com

My company, DashGo is focused on creating a dashboard (haha clever name) for content owners to use to distribute content to both digital retailers and social media networks (like MySpace, Imeem, YouTube, etc.). Part of what we do is attempt to track the consumption of that data and provide benchmarks for performance.  This is helped and hampered by Web 2.0.

Most web 2-oh coverage is consumer focused, and the semantic web stuff about data portability, open social, open id, intuitive programming is all focused on moving around personal data. My company focuses on the pro-sumer, and the options for them are woefully under-served. By numbers they are small, but by reach, huge. It is difficult to get aggregate pictures of media usage from fans, find out who they are and where they are. MySpace rules music. YouTube rules video. iTunes rules sales. But surely big holes exist. And how does one influence the other? What is the traffic cycle. What blogs are really influential? We can find aggregate numbers, but we can’t compare them.

DashGo is slowly tackling each issue. By collecting profile views, comments, streams we seek to identify growth trends, audience concentrations and overlaps. By adding some sales data, we might be able to map spikes in free consumption to spikes in sales. Or not. What we need is better inter-linking data. That is how we will improve our distribution, our marketing and our revenue. This isn’t only for content owner’s benefit. By providing more details, advertising and sponsorship can be optimized. Popular new media networks like MySpace and YouTube can increase CPM if clients and advertisers can provide statistically significant sales increases by better targeting. It’s not just a mass numbers game. Somebody has to sell something.

So what does DashGo need. We need demographic data. Not in specifics, but in bulk. Who are the consumers? Male? Female? Geographic location? Where did they come to the media from? Direct hit? Link? We know who blogged, but who clicked? Do sales follow? Where did users go next? Is there a correlation?

For bands, that helps us plan tours, pick opening (or closing acts). For video owners - are there product placement opportunities? Are there distinct “trends” in viewership and demos that can create meta-buys for ad agencies across media, network and editorial sites?

All problems to be solved. But it’s an exciting place and an exciting time.