Social networking giant MySpace has introduced audio advertisements which users must listen to before browsing music for free.
The ads, which are about 30-seconds long, appear when users try to listen to music on various artist profiles and album pages.
“Unobtrusive audio advertising is another way to communicate with an engaged auditory audience,” MySpace Music said in a statement. “As always, we are interested in hearing feedback from our users and advertising community as we run these tests.”
While users are able to avoid banner and island ads which usually populate sites, these ads cannot be closed. However, MySpace has said users could listen to up to 100 songs before seeing an ad.
It comes as News Corp is attempting to improve MySpace’s performance, with the site lagging compared to rival Facebook.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
