Amidst all the hullabaloo on social networks over the last few weeks I was pleasantly surprised to see a small nugget of good news for the music industry tucked into the social media feeds.

It turns out Myspace can now search its online video database for copyrighted material through an automated detection system from Auditude. What's amazing is how they are translating this service to ad revenue for recording artists and their labels.

One post down you'll see that AOTPR artists have been involved with our own new age media recognition service, Shazam. With Shazam all you have to do is start the application on a web enabled iPhone and it will recognize virtually any song that might be playing back on a radio or television. Options to buy can also be displayed along with the release details.

The new system at Myspace scans user uploaded videos for copyrighted music video content. When it finds one it can place ads to buy the track online.

From TechCrunch

On Wednesday the site, in a partnership with Warner Music Group, placed an overlay ad on a video for My Chemical Romance’s cover of Desolation Row. Users were presented with the option to buy the song either on Amazon, or (in an interesting twist) on a vinyl disc. Over the 24 hours that the ad ran it posted an impressive 1.2% click-through-rate (significantly higher than rates seen on typical banner ads)

The amazing thing about this setup is that it can also apply to regular user submitted content. Doing so creates a revenue structure for all the copyrighted material everybody and their cousins are already posting. Youtube could take a lesson from Myspace here. It would be highly preferable to muting several of its users.