We think that the Timberlake jokes are a little dismissive of the revamped social network, which successfully combines free music streaming and discovery with the social layer. It definitely has its kinks and problems, but the new Myspace is an undeniable improvement over the service that has been wasting away for the past couple of years.

Impressive or not, the new Myspace is already running into some problems with its free streaming music. Apparently, one large agency is accusing the company of making tracks available that they no longer have the rights to.

According to the NY Times, Merlin Network claims that Myspace is currently streaming songs from over 100 independent labels under its wing, although their permission to do so expired over a year ago.

Merlin, a global right agency representing various independent labels like Sub Pop, Merge, and Domino, says that its deals negotiated with Myspace on the labels’ behalf ended in 2011. But much of that music is still streaming to users worldwide.

“While it’s nice that Mr. Timberlake is launching his service on this platform, and acting as an advocate for the platform,” said Merlin’s Charles Caldas. “On the other hand his peers as artists are being exploited without permission and not getting remuneration for it.”

Myspace has responded, saying that any remaining Merlin-represented artsits remain due to users uploading their music, and that they would cooperate in removing the “unlicensed” tracks per Merlin’s request.

For a social network looking to rebrand itself and battle in a crowded market, the last thing they need is a rights battle.

For a look at the redesigned Myspace, check out our hands-on.

When the redesign was first teased back in September 2011, it had Justin Timberlake all over it. And why shouldn’t it? Timberlake is without question the most famous celebrity investor in the company. The preview displayed the new profile look, entirely new side-scroll browsing, and music player all within the world of Timberlake.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that the new Myspace opens up to the world right as Justin Timberlake drops a new single, right?

The new Myspace signup page features a suit and tie-clad Timberlake (looking sharp, we should add) and two buttons: “Join” and “Sign In.” The landing page also says that “Justin Timberlake’s long-awaited return to music is here…simply sign in to hear the first track from his forthcoming album.”

Indeed, when you sign in (or sign up), you’re once again met by Timberlake. There, you can play his new single “Suit & Tie” ft. Jay-Z.

Back in December I gave a first look at the redesign, which focuses heavily on music and discovery. I noted that it sports some elements from popular streaming services like Spotify or Pandora, but with a fairly robust social networking layer on top of it. It doesn’t feel like any version of Myspace that you’re familiar with – it really is a huge redesign of the UI. I thought that it looks pretty good, and functions equally as well.

The question wasn’t in the execution, but whether people would jump back on the Myspace wagon. The network has been through a lot. But with Timberlake clearly throwing all of his weight behind it and tying the release of his new single to the site’s grand re-opening, who knows?

When you first create you account, you’ll be met with the New Myspace landing page, which allows you to post a status (Myspace asks “What’s the latest?”) and navigate to your stream, your music library, and your connections. Connections come in the form of people and songs. Once you “connect” to a song, it is added to your library (and you’re allowed to comment on the particular track). Once you “connect” with a person, you’ll start to see their updates in your stream.

When adding a new post, you have 150 characters to work with. You can also add photos and songs to your updates. To add a song, just click on the music notes icon and start typing – the instant search will find what you’re looking for, considering it’s a part of the library.

On the bottom of your screen is the player, where you can interact with all the music you discover on the site. You can create mixes, add to your connections, and launch radio based on certain tracks (similar to Pandora or Spotify).

That’s where you can access the “Discover” section as well, which lets users browse trending music, mixes, videos, radio, people, and articles. Like the preview suggested, the new layout is media rich with a heavy lean toward tiles and a new side-scroll that rewards widescreen displays.

Searching inside the new Myspace is pretty cool, in that all you have to do it start typing – from anywhere. Whether you’re on the homepage or another user’s profile, just start typing and the search screen will pop up:

Here’s an album page:

User profiles also sport the same side-scroll format, and feature a profile pic and a large background image. From a user’s profile, you can check out their top-artist, mixes, connections, photos, videos, etc.

Upon first look, it appears that the New Myspace sports some of the best elements of a streaming music service like Spotify or Pandora, and also adds a vast social networking layer on top of that. We knew that the redesign would focus heavily on music, and it does just that. They just started the limited distribution of invites for those that signed up early, so the network is far from densely populated as of right now. It’s a huge redesign, that’s for sure. It truly feels nothing like any version of Myspace that you’re familiar with. It looks great and UI shouldn’t be a problem for the site moving forward. Whether people will want to jump back on the Myspace train, no matter how impressive the redesign, is the big question.

Now, it looks like Myspace is getting that overhaul. Behold, new Myspace:

“We’re hard at work building the new Myspace, entirely from scratch. But we’re staying true to our roots in one important way—empowering people to express themselves however they want. So whether you’re a musician, photographer, filmmaker, designer or just a dedicated fan, we’d love for you to be a part of our brand new community.” That’s all it says at new.myspace.com. There’s an email signup box, and Myspace says they’ll send an invite your way “very soon.”

There’s a video, however – a pretty detailed one at that. Although you may recognize elements from other popular social networks throughout the new design, Myspace is definitely putting an emphasis on music discovery that is not seen in any of its competitors. Check it out:

Ok, so here’s what we know about the New Myspace, as it stands now (obviously, this is just a preview an things could change dramatically before it actually goes live):

Sign in with Facebook or Twitter, naturally:

User profiles resemble Pinterest, with “connects,” “comments,” and “shares.” Oh, and it adopts an interesting side-scroll format.

Music, front and center, with “Mixes.” Also note the mini-player at the bottom of the screen. Clicking on one of the mixes seems to open up a page associated with the mix, complete with photos.

The homepage stream also scroll side-to-side and looks a bit Pinterest-y. The “Discover” button on the bottom opens up a music dashboard complete with tending videos, interviews, radio, events, and more mixes.

Nice drag and drop mechanism for adding music to mixes:

Music search:

Myspace investor Justin Timberlake’s all over it, including this demo of the in-profile music videos (pretty cool):

Messages have a 140 character limit and allow you to attach photos, songs, and cross-post to other networks

First impressions – really music-heavy (which should surprise nobody). New Myspace has a lot of focus on discovery and a pretty slick new UI. We’ll have to wait and see how the final product turns out, but this shows that Myspace isn’t planning on going gently into that good night.

The episode of “One-Two-Watch” released today features English performer Emeli Sande. The Scottish-born singer is interviewed an showcased in shows from her recent, small American tour including her first American performance in New York. Her recent album, ‘Our Version of Events’, which will be released in the U.S. in June, debuted at the top of the U.K. Albums Chart. Emeli will be opening for Coldplay during their U.S. tour this summer.

“Myspace was always the place where music fans could hear what was new. I’m excited to see the brand refocus on this with the ‘One-Two-Watch’ series,” said Scott Vener, lead “curator” for Myspace. “By identifying and curating what’s next, the series simplifies the discovery process for people, helping reactivate passive listeners around their passion for music.”

Here’s the Emeli “One-Two-Watch,” and you can decide for yourself whether Myspace has successfully “curated” new music for you:

One-Two-Watch: Meet the U.K.’s biggest secret … Emeli Sand

Myspace Music | Myspace Video

If it has been a while (years, I’m sure) since you’ve visited Myspace, you might go over and check out the site. It’s not the one you remember and it won’t bring back bittersweet memories – but it also won’t start auto-playing terrible music. Now they try and “curate” the music for you, but I have the feeling they are probably slightly behind services such as Pandora and Spotify. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

In fact, MySpace has gained over a million sign-ups since launching its new music player in December, the company announced today. The player is drawing 40,000 sign-ups a day in the U.S., on average.

“The numbers tell an amazing story of strong momentum and dramatic change for Myspace,” says CEO Tim Vanderhook. “And the one million-plus new user accounts we’ve seen in the last 30 days validates our approach. Myspace is building meaningful social entertainment experience around content, where consumers can share and discover the music they love. Consumers are getting excited about Myspace again – a testament to a great music product.”

It probably helps that the player comes with free access to 42 million songs. Here’s a closer look at the player:

It probably also helps that it comes with Facebook connectivity.

MySpace has expressed, since relaunching, that it aspires to sort of be the Hulu for music. A million new sign-ups since December is not a bad start.

Last month, Panasonic and MySpace revealed a new partnership that will bring a MySpace TV channel to connected devices. This could further help the new MySpace grow.

Perhaps its new owners won’t “screw up” with MySpace as badly as News Corp. did. Also consider this (from late December):

Before the sale, Myspace had already tried to rebrand itself as an entertainment hub, largely dominated by music-related entertainment. When the company went ahead and submitted to Facebook by letting users login with their Facebook accounts, I believe I said something along the lines of, “Myspace is more like MTV.com now than Facebook.”

It appears it will continue to go in such a direction.

The media has been waiting for Advertising Week, when Specific Media would talk about Myspace, and that has come. They pitched the idea and had a special concert with performances from Far East Movement, B.o.B. and Natasha Bedingfield, according to the LA Times.

Liz Gannes got ahold of Myspace’s pitch deck:

Within, it reminds us that Myspace has just as large an audience as it did in 2005, when News Corp. acquired it. The decline in traffic is mentioned, but it says traffic has steadied and “is currently trending with the market”.

One slide in the presentation says “no single player possesses all the capabilities that Myspace offers,” and that points to the following bullets:

• The Hulu of Music: Unique content rights with Big Four labels and 20K independent labels allows for ad-supported music video and audio streaming
• Owned and operated property engaging 70M+ global consumers online each month
• Database of 325M+ active email addresses
• User registration data enables targeted content and advertising based on consumer interests
• Ranked second-most popular music site, well ahead of Vevo and Spotfiy

Myspace says its vision is to “become the #1 online community music destination,” and that its mission is to “feed the energy youth culture everywhere.” Its target audiences are fans, artists, music/brand ad partners, and “cultural influencers”.

I guess we’ll see how it goes.

People with knowledge of the situation say that News Corp. is in talks to give Vevo a majority stake in Myspace, according to a report from Bloomberg. “The talks are preliminary and an agreement may not be reached, said the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly,” reports Andy Fixmer. “Under the scenario being discussed, News Corp. would exchange the Myspace social network for a stake in a new venture, the people said. Vevo.com is one of several parties looking at Myspace, two of the people said.”

Vevo is a joint venture among Sony, Universal, and Abu Dhabi Media. It has a partnership with Google/YouTube, in which the two share ad revenue.

Vevo only launched in late 2009, and it is already one of the top web video properties. According to comScore‘s list of top U.S. online video properties last month, Vevo took the second spot, just behind Google Sites (in other words YouTube). While the difference in views was drastically different between those two (144,058 compared to 51,025), there’s a good chance that a significant amount of the YouTube views can actually be attributed to Vevo content, as Vevo videos appear all over the world’s largest video site. If you ever search for music videos on YouTube, there’s a good chance that you’ve watched some Vevo videos.

With that, a Vevo-owned Myspace would seem to make a fair amount of sense. I think it’s safe to say that one of the biggest things Myspace has going for it at this point is its video content, much of which is music-oriented. A Vevo ownership would mean instantly more Myspace video views I would think. In fact, Myspace already has Vevo video content on it itself.

For example, the band TV on the Radio premiered a new music video on MySpace, but now if you go to their MySpace page, it’s showing a Vevo-branded player for the video.

Myspace has basically conceded to Facebook in terms of social network, choosing to become more of an entertainment hub, comparable to an MTV.com.

An official statement on the matter explained, "Songtrust is the first online rights management solution that empowers all songwriters to take control of their music publishing and related rights.  By streamlining the complex process of registering song copyrights, collecting royalties, and maximizing licensing opportunities, Songtrust empowers independent songwriters to track how and where their songs are being used around the world."

Songtrust isn’t some dinky tool exclusively employed by garage bands, either.  The organization, which was just established in October of last year by Downtown Music, already boasts ties to the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), BMI, and SESAC (originally the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers).

So Courtney Holt, the president of Myspace Music, said, "We’re very excited to deepen our relationship with Downtown Music and to promote this new, innovative service that helps songwriters take control of their music publishing."

Unfortunately, no financial details were shared, making it hard to say what level of effort/investment this represents.  The move might just be intended to sweeten the pot prior to a sale of MySpace, or perhaps it’s supposed to have a major effect.

In any event, MySpace Music intends to promote Songtrust to all of the site’s musicians.

MySpace has partnered with marketing platform Reverbnation and will offer its FanReach email marketing tool to all musicians with a profile. FanReach allows artists to communicate with others both on MySpace and via targeted email campaigns.

Myspace Music will also be offering artists  a  stats tool that provides an overview of their fans, their music plays, and their profile visitors and allows them to track fan activity on their Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter pages.

Additionally, Myspace music introduced new song embedding functionality that will allow artists to share their music with fans on the internet to play directly in-line.

“Myspace music has always been about nurturing and facilitating the relationship between artist and fan; FanReach is an important addition to our growing arsenal of music products that help artists own a direct communication with their fan base,” says Courtney Holt, President of Myspace Music.

“This is a continued commitment on our behalf to build tools that enable artists to leverage the Myspace platform to effectively manage their presence across the web.”