MySpace Music Adds IODA Indie Catalog of 1 Million Songs

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on October 23, 2008 - 9:59am.

Los Angeles - MySpace Music, the joint venture between the News Corp.-owned (NYSE: NWS) social network and the major record labels, announced on Thursday that it has signed a deal with IODA to bring the independent digital music distributor's catalog of more than one million tracks from over 50,000 artists to the service.

"Many of IODA's labels have been early and active participants in the MySpace Music community, and consider it an essential tool to develop relationships with their fans," said Kevin Arnold, CEO and founder of IODA.

"We're happy to bring the opportunity to monetize all of this activity to our clients, and look forward to seeing what an ad-supported streaming model can generate with the resources of MySpace behind it."

IODA did not say whether it also took an equity position in the joint venture -- a sticking point for other independent label holdouts such as A2IM and the Merlin collective.

Fellow independent digital music distributor The Orchard has already licensed its catalog to MySpace Music.

MySpace Music said it now counts over 5 million artist profiles; the service streamed more than 1 billion songs in its first days of availability.