Recently, a step was taken in the music world that was inevitable but could be instrumental to the future of the record industry. MySpace, the social networking site that is responsible for approximately 36 percent of the country’s procrastination for people ages 12 to 38 (my own statistics), is deciding to reach for your musical dollars.

Last week, MySpace officially launched MySpace Music. It gives MySpace members the chance to build their playlists with a new media player and add up to 10 songs, but that’s not what makes this big news. Thanks to the site signing on with the four major labels (Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Bros.), casual browsers will be able to stream millions of songs for free thanks to ad-supported revenue. This also allows artists to upload their entire discography for consumption instead of the six-song limit on MySpace pages.

But some people are going to want to do more than just stream the music. They want ownership, and thanks to MySpace’s partnership with Amazon.com’s MP3 store, they can purchase the songs from MySpace Music. Whether people know it or not, this could prove to be a problem for iTunes.

That’s because it brings attention to the under-publicized Amazon.com MP3 store, which has a few advantages in the digital music battles. While there are not as many artists who have their work available for download on Amazon.com, the songs are twice the sound quality (256 kbps compared to iTunes 128 kbps), don’t have the restrictions of iTunes’ Digital Rights Management lock and in many cases are less expensive to purchase.

Granted, it isn’t an immediate threat to iTunes supremacy. But no amount of cool TV commercials with dancing silouettes can compare to the MySpace’s musical community. When people want to hear music from the next big thing, to find a local band or try out a track from a mainstream artist, MySpace is where they usually turn. If the ad support pays off, they may be able to lure indie labels in the future. If even a portion of MySpace’s traffic want to download tracks instead of listening to the mediocre sound of streaming audio, MySpace Music has a chance to grab a healthy portion of the MP3 market.

And if that happens, those iTunes silhouettes may pull a few muscles from all the moves they’ll have to bust to make up for it.