LOS ANGELES (AP):

MySpace, which has lured millions of big acts and garage bands alike to build profiles on the popular social networking hub to attract fans, said on Thursday it will turn those pages into portals for selling music, merchandise and more.

Helping back the new MySpace Music are three of the biggest recording companies - Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Corp.

Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed, but each of the music companies will receive an unspecified equity stake in the new company, said Chris DeWolfe, MySpace co-founder and chief executive.

The fourth-largest music company, EMI Group PLC, is not part of the deal.

DeWolfe said MySpace is in licensing talks with 'everyone' but declined to say where discussions stand with EMI, home to artistes such as Coldplay and Norah Jones.

MySpace Music, which will roll out gradually in coming months, will enable artistes to sell music downloads, concert tickets and merchandise such as T-shirts through their profile pages and to offer ringtones through a unit of MySpace parent News Corp.

"We believe that the Web is becoming increasingly more social," DeWolfe said during a conference call. "MySpace Music is a new way of experiencing music online that everyone can participate in."

Fans also will be able stream audio and video for free through musical artistes' profile pages.

sale of tracks

DeWolfe said some tracks will be sold without copy-protection safeguards but noted that the major labels had committed only to experimenting with offering content in an unrestricted format.

Selling music without the copy protections that make such tracks incompatible with Apple Inc's iPod music players could place MySpace Music in direct competition with existing digital music stores such as Apple's iTunes, Amazon.com, Napster Inc and others, analysts said.

"It's definitely got a lot of potential to it, but how much it really changes the game is yet to be determined," said Michael Gartenberg, vice-president and research director for JupiterResearch. "This is one of those important events in the history of digital music and it has a lot of potential going forward."

MySpace may also be looking for ways to maintain its lead on rival social network Facebook, which has been gaining in popularity.