

"What the Fuck is Going On?" A musician's take on MySpace - izak30
http://thesoundofhumanlives.blogspot.com/2009/11/what-fuck-is-going-on.html

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fauigerzigerk
I think ad based services have a very fundamental problem: Their users are not
their customers.

It isn't always a problem, but when the crunch comes, users lose and
advertising clients win. Eventually the service provider loses as well because
users move on and advertising clients follow them.

I don't know if the conclusion is that ad based services just don't work, or
if it's just about striking the right balance between the diverging interests
of users and ad clients.

I suspect it depends on the type of service. I would not want to rely
professionally on an ad based service. I want to be the customer, not just
some means to get customers.

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chriseppstein
Made this comment on the blog too:

Please don't take this personally, but you're not thinking clearly about this.
Allow me to explain:

First, it's important to realize that value is created through partnership.
Basically, the net value of the two products when coupled can be greater than
the sum of the two individually. For this reason, you shouldn't imply that
profits from your partner imply that those profits subtracted from your
profits -- it's quite likely you have both made more together than either of
you would have made without the other.

Consider a Mall. The mall operator can charge more for rent in the mall than
it could for an equivalent store in isolation because there is value of
bringing consumers together. The store owners make more money as a result of
partnering with each other and a portion of those profits goes back to the
partner because the two have collectively decided that it is a better strategy
than for the mall owner to charge an entrance fee to visitors.

Second, it's incorrect to compare the success of any one band or even a sample
of bands to the success of myspace, google, etc. Rather you have to compare
the success of the two industries collectively. As users become exposed to a
greater variety of music and musicians, they will become more selective in
their tastes. So some bands who are truly exceptional will be vaulted to
success by this plethora of users and their use of social tools to communicate
with each other. And more mediocre bands who used to be able to eek out a
modest living will no longer because users find more awesome bands than they
used to (and have a fixed amount of attention to give).

The fact is, there have never before been so many awesome bands heard by so
many people and it has never been _easier_ to get into the business than it is
right now. So while it seems that you're band might not be one of the best in
the world that succeeded, you need to realize that you at least got the same
shot as everyone else and a better chance at success than you would have had
20 years ago.

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izak30
Businesses pay rent at a mall, and in turn they get to decorate the place how
they want (presumably, not with ads for other stores inside).

It's still an interesting problem, and the mall analogy is a good one. Would
bands pay if there were listeners? I think so, BUT would it just become a
place for big bands on big labels to show off how expensive of a graphic
designer they can hire, because the mall just keeps raising the rent? I don't
know

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cvinson
I have a bit of experience here, as I run a website builder app for bands.

I launched Bandzoogle.com in 2003, around the same time that MySpace came out.
I thought we were dead; they were offering all the stuff we did (a guestbook,
music player, photo gallery) for FREE. How could we compete with that?

We decided to focus on being a "premium" service, and kept adding stuff that
bands wanted. To my surprise MySpace actually helped our business. Bands would
sign up because they wanted something more than "just a myspace page", or
"without all those ads". We're the SmugMug to their Photobucket. It worked for
us, we have 10 employees and have been profitable since 2004.

That said, social networks like MySpace are still necessary for bands.
Potential fans will stumble across an artist's profile page, often from links
from other bands they are playing a gig with. The goal is to hook them, then
get them over to the artist's .COM site. There, they own the fan list, and can
present a much more compelling experience than on a profile page alone. It is
a bit more work to have to maintain profiles everywhere, but companies like
ArtistData, Reverbnation, and my own (Bandzoogle) are making this a lot
simpler.

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cubicle67
Interesting

Could you have a site just for music that also helps bands get their music
into Itunes Store, Amazon etc, and then makes revenue from referral links to
those stores. So on the bands site, the only advertising are links allowing
people to buy that band's music from iTunes or Amazon

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ahlatimer
I've been tossing around the idea of something like this. I don't know if it
would be able to compete with something like last.fm, but I think allowing
bands to quickly throw up a profile (with the possibility of styling to their
liking), then taking a percentage of whatever is sold through the site
wouldn't be a bad idea. Bands get exposure and a place to communicate with
fans. Fans can discover new artists without the amount of ads MySpace has.
Everyone wins.

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cubicle67
That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking, with the addition of helping
bands get their music into the various online stores.

So yeah, give it a shot. Sounds like there's a market there if done well

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physcab
Artists.grooveshark.com - we work very hard to get new artists heard and our
analytics solution helps show where you have the most users listening to your
songs so you can tour in the most effective places.

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unalone
What a whiner. MySpace was an ugly hybrid of a social network and a music
site. I'm glad that it's gone. Just because he hates social networks doesn't
make MySpace excusable.

TheSixtyOne? Lala? Bandcamp? All more elegant and more precise tools than
MySpace ever was.

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izak30
Well, myspace had traction and users.

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unalone
I get your point, but I disagree with you. Users doesn't matter unless those
users are seeing you. If you're a band, using MySpace to attract users doesn't
work well; I can imagine a clever band using Facebook much more effectively
than they'd ever use MySpace, because Facebook's designed for virality.

If I'm a band, I want two things: I want an easy way to distribute music, and
I want networking. My point was that MySpace offered a bastardized version of
each. Facebook offers networking better than anything else; if I'm looking for
follower count and nothing else, Facebook's got everything beat. Its music
system isn't terrible, but it's much easier to use Bandcamp to attract users.
That means that you've got everything you need, unless you're deluded into
thinking that people will randomly stumble upon you online and that Facebook
doesn't work well for that; in that case, The Sixty One is the perfect
solution. So it takes a little set-up, but you end up with a much stronger
solution than you had with MySpace.

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dan_the_welder
I just checked out The Sixty One and it looks great, but _it did not exist_
when the the Myspace band rush started.

Edit-- The Sixty One is amazing. What a beautiful UI, it works likes a charm.
I am gonna join and recommend the hell out of it.

Edit,Edit-- It let me sign up without stopping the song I was playing or
losing track of the songs I had already listened to. Very pro, this is how you
do it right.

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ivankirigin
It's all up for grabs, imho.

~~~
davi
You mean you think someone could take significant users away from Facebook?
It's hard to see how Facebook can lose out, this generation at least. People
seem to like using the internet that way, and all their friends are there.

Maybe the next generation, who grows up watching their parents using Facebook,
will think of it as boring and passe, and there will be room for someone else.
What happened when people starting _liking_ Japanese cars, and American cars
just started to seem big and ugly and crappy.

Unless Facebook screws it all up (still could happen I guess).

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electromagnetic
We have to define what we mean here, this isn't a Gen X or Gen Y or whatever
shit issue. This is likely a 10 year cycle going on.

I remember catching the blurred end of chatrooms, where AOL and Yahoo had
untold numbers of chatrooms. These seemed to die off rather fast when MSN and
AIM messengers appeared on the scene, although I believe I had ICQ when it was
still in its first version, which puts a good 8 years between the founding of
ICQ and the founding of Facebook, and I'd say roughly a 10 year gap between
the popularity of IM and fully formed social networking sites like Facebook.

I bet between 2015-2020 there will likely be a new upheaval in the social
networking area, likely due to a major change in the way we access the
internet. Just how growing internet usage made usenet and chatrooms
impractical due to connectivity issues. Usenet users typically either only
knew people who were online or didn't know anybody online. Chatroom users
might have only known a handful of people with an internet connection, which
made it easy enough to coordinate meeting up online. This died when people
knew 50+ people who were online, and ICQ, AIM and MSN with contact lists made
it easy to organise. Now virtually everybody you know is online, and a site
like Facebook allows you access to all of them.

The revolution now is likely to be access to the internet, things will
revolutionise when people spend a large proportion of their time online with
full unrestricted (IE no office firewall) and portable internet access (a la
iPhone and Blackberry).

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dan_the_welder
I agree with you totally, there is a cycle and walled garden social networking
is the current phase and will fade into the background. Not go away mind you,
because nothing ever really does,it just changes.

I think that personal websites will surge and be augmented with social
networking modules that adhere to some sort of standard. Something like
encrypted RSS linking private content for your 'friends' and public content
for the rest of the people.

I think the popularity of social networking over the current definition of
personal webpage is driven by three things, ease of use, the ability to define
public/private content and cost.

There are plenty of niches in such a model, pure self owned/hosted
(Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal etc with plugins), advertising supported we make it
easy for you (Tripod, Geocities), free(Blogger, Livejournal), subscription
(pay to ditch ads), and even old guys interconnecting with the new (a fancy
Facebook Connect).

Benefits that I look forward to are my ability to control my interface and not
have it change on _someone elses_ whim, complete ownership of my personally
generated content and an end to the serial monogamy of having to move to the
new-new thing when the old-new thing inevitably dies.

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dan_the_welder
Hmmm, thinking here. It's basically distributed Friendfeed which already seems
to have all the functionality I'm describing.Except you can host your own
stuff and adhere to a common API.

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cf
I want to know why there isn't a dedicated site to "follow bands", know when
they are playing in my neighborhood, and share with friends bands and songs we
both like.

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alexfarran
Last.fm does that.

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chaosprophet
Perhaps, someone could write a Facebook app especially for hosting and serving
self-made music??? Something like a Fan Pages on steroids???

