Digital Notes: MTV.com Sees an Opening as MySpace Fades Away AUSTIN, Tex. - Not long ago, MySpace was the central destination for online music, the place where fans could connect with seemingly every artist on earth. Since then the site's popularity has plunged (and its new owners are trying to resuscitate it). But can anything take over from MySpace as music's online agora? Well, MTV believes it can. On Thursday, at the South by Southwest festival here, Van Toffler, the veteran MTV executive who is the president of MTV Networks" Music and Logo Group at Viacom, announced Artists.MTV, a project to let musicians "claim" and customize their pages among the thousands on MTV's site. As Mr. Toffler explained in a meeting before his speech, the idea is to collect in one place - namely MTV.com, whose sites have 60 million unique visitors each month - some of the traffic that might go off in various directions when a fan looks for a band online. "Artist pages exist as islands on the Internet," Mr. Toffler said. Maybe you learn about an artist on Pandora, then you see a video on YouTube or read about them on Wikipedia, then maybe you buy the song on iTunes. It's a disparate experience. What we are trying to do is connect them through music discovery. The new pages, which will begin in private beta form in May and are to open fully this summer, will allow artists to post their own content, and sell music, tickets or merchandise. To pull this off, MTV has teamed with Topspin Media, one of a growing number of "direct to fan" technology companies that create online tools for artists to use in selling and marketing their music and other products. Musicians who claim their Artists.MTV pages will have use of Topspin's technology - including embeddable widgets - and pay Topspin its standard 15 percent fee for any sales. MTV takes an affiliate fee out of Topspin's cut, said Ian Rogers, the chief executive of Topspin. In addition, through a program that Mr. Toffler called Full Frontal - an MTV news release suggests this may not be the final name - artists who post material on the new pages could be chosen to be featured on television and online through MTV and its sister channels, like VH1 and CMT. Like any aggregation site, MTV's artist pages are an attempt to capture as much of the available traffic as possible, to extend the company's already large lead over other sites. But Mr. Toffler bristled at the suggestion that the goal of the project was to be everything to all music fans on the Internet. "I'd be happy to be the MTV of the Internet," he said.