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Everything Means Nothing to MeMySpace Music lets you listen to pretty much every song ever recorded, and it still sucks.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008, at 4:42 PM ET

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In 2006, Matthew Shaer graded online music recommenders like Pandora and Last.fm. Farhad Manjoo praised the Pandora radio application for the iPhone. Reihan Salam wrote that a tax on online music isn't as horrible as it sounds. Timothy Noah found the iTunes customer-service number, and Paul Collins went in search of the insanely great songs that Apple won't let you hear. Christopher Beam investigated whether anyone can tell the difference between a 256 kbps and a 128 kbps MP3.

With certain restrictions, MySpace Music also lets you share your playlists with your friends. This might have been its best feature, but the restrictions rankle: MySpace will allow you to make only one of your playlists public—you can't make one mix tape for your spouse and another for your mom. Worse, you can share your playlist only through your MySpace profile; if you want to send it to your co-workers, you've got to be OK with them seeing pictures of you dressed up as a drunken pirate. Imeem's playlist-sharing features are much better—it lets you share more playlists, and you can embed them on other sites.

This gets to the single biggest problem with the MySpace Music service—it's MySpace's music service. Every feature remains tied to a social network that has become enormously popular despite its terrible user interface and—since the rise of Facebook—appeals mostly to an adolescent demographic. You need to have a MySpace account to use MySpace Music; if you've resisted getting a MySpace profile, the music service isn't reason enough to sign up. Little about using MySpace Music is pleasant: Its song search engine, for example, is extremely limited, giving you no way to refine your query by narrowing it down to certain albums or versions of songs. When you search for a popular track—say, Lil Wayne's "Lollipop"—you get dozens of results and no explanation for how each version differs from the other. MySpace also lacks any "music-discovery" engine—it doesn't tell you what you might like based on what your friends like or what you've searched for or listened to in the past. Worst of all, the system is gummed up by ads. Every inch of every page is plastered with some flashy sponsorship message; along with being ugly and off-putting, the ads slow down the entire site.

These annoying ads are expected to be quite lucrative for MySpace and the music industry. Record labels also hope that MySpace will present competition for Apple, which has gained enormous power in the music business through the iTunes Music Store—the largest retailer of music in the country, beating not only other online stores but also offline stores like Wal-Mart. But if the labels want to create an alternative to iTunes, they would do well to study its rise. Apple's genius was to minimize its service's restrictions by amping up its usability. People are willing to put up with iTunes' annoying copy-protection scheme because finding and buying songs there is amazingly fast, easy, and fun. The same holds for Hulu, the wonderful TV-streaming site that NBC and Fox launched last year. Sure, it has ads, but they don't crowd your entire field of view, and the sponsorship messages feel like a reasonable price for the service you're getting. MySpace Music doesn't elicit the same thrill. The site's design is so terrible and overly commercialized that not even the service's amazing breadth—remember, you can find nearly any song you want in seconds—can save it from being a drag to use.

Still, MySpace Music offers some hope. Two years ago the idea that the music industry might allow a Web company to stream songs for free seemed unthinkable. But we've been getting music for free online for years now—a site that offers to give it to us legally isn't going to succeed unless it throws in features that haven't been implemented well elsewhere (like sharing playlists). And it's got to be pretty and work well, too. That the industry has taken a stab toward creating such a service is promising. Maybe someday it'll consider doing something as simple and elegant as Muxtape. As Ouellette put it in his farewell note: "The industry will catch up some day; it pretty much has to."

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

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