MySpace Names Brands Sponsoring Its Free Music

McDonald’s, Toyota, State Farm and Sony will be among the first brands to market on the new MySpace Music expected to debut later this week.

The new service, a joint venture between MySpace owner News Corp. and three of the four largest music companies, will let users stream and share music for free, but will charge for downloads to a device.

The free streaming model will make MySpace Music heavily reliant on ad support, and yesterday the company announced placement deals with some of its charter brand marketers. For example, McDonald’s will brand the MySpace Music personal music player and will also sponsor some free song downloads on the site.

“We’re excited to be a part of this innovative new music platform that allows us to connect with customers in a unique and relevant way,” McDonald’s USA Marketing Director Anja Carroll said in a statement. “This venture provides customized tools and applications to a large, passionate audience, helping them to discover, download and enjoy the music they love.”

Toyota will play up its music connections with “Toyota Tuesdays,” which will offer selected free music downloads every Tuesday for a year after the MySpace Music platform launches. Toyota will also get a placement on the Featured Playlist page, where celebrity playlists are highlighted.

State Farm ads will rotate through all pages of the site, including the featured playlists, the personal music player and other pages where users will go to create and edit their personalized playlists.

“Through our NowWhat.com efforts, State Farm has created a strong connection with our younger, more music-savvy audience,” said the company’s advertising director Ed Gold. “MySpace Music will offer an even deeper breadth of artist selections and music genres to … our current and potential customers.”

And Sony Pictures, the movie affiliate of joint venture partner Sony/BMG, will skin all user profile playlists with branding from its upcoming comedy “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” set to release on Oct. 3. For a week before that date, all MySpace Music users will be presented with the playlist from the movie upon logging in and given the opportunity to engage with the picture’s MySpace page. Sony Pictures will also post roadblock ads on the MySpace Music home page.

MySpace users can currently have one song playing while viewers are visiting their profiles. But the new service will allow members to create extended play lists of songs from the artists managed by the three music partners to the deal: Universal, Sony/BMG and Warner Music. Profile visitors can click through those play lists, listen to the artists’ catalogs and buy any tracks they want to download with one click. Amazon.com will handle the transaction and download. The tracks purchased will be playable on an iPod or Windows MP3 device.

MySpace has always focused more heavily than rival Facebook on marketing music; the social network was initially founded as an online place for independent bands to market themselves. The network currently has 120 million members worldwide, compared to a reported 100 million for Facebook.

To date MySpace has not appointed a CEO to run its music platform, although the joint venture was announced in April and given a September launch window in an announcement made last July.

Press reports said the music companies taking part in the project want one cent in fees every time someone plays one of their songs on ad-supported services. That would require MySpace Music to charge $10 for every 1,000 ad impressions simply to recoup its expenses.