(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.

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

The Weezer video is at 2.2 million views on YouTube in 3 days. Pretty great. Now what?

Part of working with entertainment “product” online is not just figuring out how to get the flag above the fray, but what to do with all the data that you grab when you break through. It’s still woefully hard to do great meta-studies, something DashGo is looking to fix.

Here are three items extractable from the YouTube insight module that we can make quick analysis of and hopefully improve our lot:

1) The viewers are 65% male

2) The top two viewing demos are 0-18 and 35-45.

3) The number one non-Youtube referring site is Valleywag.com 

This gives us a broad, but helpful, sense of who Weezer has the attention of. And it looks like men interested in tech are at least fans of the video. How do we use this? Well, Weezer will eventually go on tour again. And when they decided to put tickets onsale, the standard play is to take out ads in free weeklies and increasingly, banner ads across music blogs and sites. But since we know a good portion of Weezer’s fans (at least of the video) are older, and male, and interested in tech (or tech gossip). If you want to serve the core, which a tour really does, perhaps dollars would be well spent on Gizmodo, Engadget and Techcrunch.

Meanwhile enjoy your “Pork & Beans” 

Weezer [Red] Album out June 3!