According to Digital Music News, most of the music on MySpace is "copyrighted and streamed without permission," which is entirely contrary to my experience of the site. I could be looking at the wrong pages, but just about all of the music I have heard on MySpace has been by bands who posted it there themselves. All of that music has been copyrighted, of course, having been recorded into a fixed medium (essentially, all recorded music is copyrighted; what an artist decides to do with their copyrights is another matter entirely).
Said MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe,
Sure, buddy, it's all about the artists. As you probably know, the music that most people talk about when they refer to "copyrighted music" is not owned by the artists anymore, nor is it controlled by artists, unless they're highly established. The artists have sold all or some of their right to the song to their labels, which then do things like pressuring MySpace into hiring Gracenote to expunge those songs from its site based on acoustic fingerprinting.
A better idea would have been to permit people to stream these identified songs under a blanket MySpace license, restricting full-on downloads. That way, people would still feel free to post whatever they wanted, and the labels would get their micropayment. This "identify and delete" strategy is another result of the record labels ignoring new opportunities in their never-ending quest to make online music conform to the standards of the past.
As it happens, Gracenote and MySpace have more in common than just this project. Both owe their success to millions of individuals who uploaded and organized data, for free, and owe their continued success to the selling of that same data back to those same people in various forms. (Gracenote came into existence by somehow purchasing and licensing the CDDB database, which was originally created by grassroots volunteers).
Update (based on comments): Yes, it's true, I really haven't personally encountered much copyright infringement on MySpace. But then again, most of my MySpace visits occur because I'm trying to find new music or someone has sent me their band's MySpace URL. After the whole Friendster thing, I didn't really bother going all the way with MySpace aside from the music aspect.
