Amit Kapur, Chief Operating Officer of MySpace, is on the Le Web stage right now. So far, he had a quite glorious career at MySpace. He joined the company as the first person to boost business development and did a good job at creating revenue streams (e.g. the $900M Google deal) and partnering up with giants like Sony BMG. Kapur currently oversees MySpace’s global operations.
Kapur in happier times
But right now, I feel sorry for the man. He’s about to get interviewed by one of tech world’s toughest cookies, Michael Arrington. That TechCrunch guy. Let’s see what happens.
Off the record
Before the interview started, Kapur must have been pretty excited though, as he has the honor to announce a new MySpace feature. After chatting with Arrington for a while, “MySpace users are not stupid, not uneducated and not poor” and “MySpace music streams a couple of hundred million songs a day. But that’s off the record”, Kapur was ready for the BIG announcement. Hold on to yourself.
MySpace launches a MySpace toolbar which makes it possible to carry MySpace along with you while browsing the web. Yes, that means you can search, check status messages, look up your friends, whatever. But there’s one thing you can’t: playing music! The reason? Bad for advertising revenue. Kapur: “We’re launching products that have the right balance between user experience and monetization. In that perspective, we haven’t found a way for playing music in the toolbar yet.”
The toolbar is only available for Windows users, Mac comes later. I. Can’t. Wait.
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