MySpace Music lands in the UK in time to closedown

After all this waiting, and despite the clear indications from HQ that they can't afford the free streaming at the heart of the service much longer, MySpace Music has launched its UK variant.

The slogan sounds oddly familiar:

MySpace Music has launched in Britain with a "Get Real Close" campaign

Get Real Close? Is that closer than you'd get with HMV's Get Closer campaign, or is it not quite as close?

The idea of launching the UK site now is, erm, perfectly clear:

"This is indicative of the direction we want to go," said Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music.

"We want to be a social content and media platform and we believe heavily in the socialization of content as core to our future strategy," he told Reuters in London.

"It's not about just a passive listening experience. We want you to be active, we want you to go places, we want you to search for music. Music lives in places that require you to work to find it. We know our audience is hungry for discovery."

Righto, so you're suggesting you're the perfect platform to aggregate music that you have to search for elsewhere? That makes sense.

Clearly, the hope is that other companies will do some of the expensive work of streaming, but that does raise the question of what, exactly, MSMUk sees their role as.

"We're a large and live media platform for the social sharing and consumption of music, and we're also bolting on great business opportunities -- ticketing, touring events, merchandise, downloads," Holt said.

But you've just said that you expect your audience to be off, working hard to discover music elsewhere. If I was a music business, wouldn't I want to be going into partnership with the sites where people will be listening to music for minutes at a stretch? Isn't it better to have advertising at the finish post rather than at the start?