Anyone for a new music social networking site?
Jim Carroll
All things eventually come to an end, though the death throes for MySpace may go on for quite some time yet. No doubt, though, with staff lay-offs and rumours galore about a sell-off, the one-time social networking giant is headed for the exit.
It had a very good innings, especially if you were one of the site’s founders who trousered the $580 million News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch paid to get his mitts on the site in 2005. Rupe may be the leading Voldemort of the media world, but his MySpace play hasn’t really been one which has been highlighted all that often in News Corp’s annual report. As Facebook (over 500 million users and rising) and Twitter (over 200 million users and rising, though its media profile would lead you to think that number is much higher) have came, saw and conquered the social networking world, MySpace has slipped back into the pack. It’s not quite Bebo, but it sure as hell appears to be heading in that direction.
But MySpace still has users – and active ones at that. The music-making community who first colonised MySpace are still there and are still updating their pages with gig details, flyers, new music and occasional blogs. If you want to find a website for a band, chances are their MySpace page will be in the top five or six search results. As I know from writing about new bands every week, the vast majority of newbies still use MySpace when they can’t afford a site of their own. It’s a network which has form, a (very clunky but) recognisable layout and is open to all (no need for logins as is often the case with many Facebook pages).
So while the accepted wisdom is that MySpace is dying, it’s still a site which is still getting traction from musicians despite the huge spike in popularity for sites like Bandcamp, Soundcloud and, in Ireland, Breaking Tunes. Musicians may also be utilising Twitter and Facebook in huge numbers – “utilising” being spam-tweeting about upcoming gigs to everyone with an @ – but music is largely a bolt-on to these services and is not the main selling point. Hence, why they keep coming back to MySpace.
All of which makes you wonder if there is any demand for a standalone music networking site, a site which is basically MySpace without the rubbish design and clunky user interface. Someone like Kevin Leftar would argue that a music social networking site just will not succeed because fans are less interested than we think in such a thing. He’s got a point: while there was much play at the outset about the bogus notion that labels were attracted to bands with thousands of MySpace friends (not forgetting either the Arctic Monkeys’ bull about how MySpace “broke” the band), the site these days is more B2B (band to band looking for gigs and links) than B2C (band to consumer).
Yet as MySpace begins to recede and start the shut down process, there are still several new plays like Roostie, plays which look like MySpace and sound like MySpace (but, unlike a quacking duck, claim not to want to be MySpace), coming to the boil. Whether these will even survive the year remains to be seen, but there is money and time being invested nonetheless. And while we write this obit for MySpace, it’s still obviously making some advertising cash, though not enough to recoup News Corp’s investment and subsequent spend (hey, Rupe wanted to be down with the hip kids).
So OTR readers, care to build a new MySpace? Is there really any demand for a new music social network or will it just be a bunch of bands hyping oneanother to each other? Have music fans any real interest anymore in expressing their preference for one band or another by friending them online? Or has all that action moved to Facebook or Twitter? Can Facebook kill these notion stone dead by upping their music inputs? Or are Bandcamp and Soundcloud really the answer? Over to you.
If Apple get serious about their Ping idea then it has the potential to become the pre-eminent music social networking service. It needs a lot of work of course, but with the inbuilt iPod generation already in place it would seem a logical move.
Great line from that IABUK site on Myspace: “It seems the $580million recently spent by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp on purchasing the site will prove money well spent.”
This seems to be the question du jour among many people in the music industry now. Personally I don’t think there would be enough attention paid to the small new bands in comparison to the bigger ones, like Lady Gaga, Bieber, and Kanye West. They are the three biggest artists in the world (apart from Jay-z and Beyonce I guess) and all of them have significant online contributions that keep their fanbase ticking over. But a new band from, say Waterford? What would people rather find out about: the big LA parties Kanye is at, or the goings on in a tiny Irish pub? I just don’t think it can happen.
Sean Adams (founder of Drowned In Sund) asked the same question you did Jim, over at new question and answer site Quora: http://www.quora.com/With-MySpace-no-longer-the-dominant-social-network-is-there-now-room-for-a-social-network-dedicated-to-music.
And as some of the answers suggest, there is not enough room for a new social network site. iLike and Last.fm are both mentioned early enough in the comment section. Ping is also mentioned. Do we just want a site to collate these things together already? Last.fm should be doing a better job. But I think it is down to the fact that bands neglect their online ‘duties’. I said before on this page that every band needs to tweet and facebook more, but I have since changed my tune slightly. There needs to be silence sometimes. I don’t want my favourite band to be tweeting rubbish. I don’t want my image of them distorted but that is what happens to certain bands online. There should be some distance between fan and band, in my opinion (though this is liable to change by the next time this argument gets dragged up).
I hadn’t heard Roostie before, though I had heard of Fanity.com which says, “There’s no faster way to get the latest artists news, updates and media to share and discuss with friends.” Is this going to be the next big thing? Is it a ‘proper’ music social networking site? Again, if you look at the most popular artists on there, the demand for that band down the road is just not there. And I don’t think that it should be there.
Like you pointed out in a previous thread YouTube is where everyone from your six year old nieces to their 66 year old uncles are going for their daily hits and Spotify/Last fm is probably where the more diehard + net savvy music fans are gravitating towards. Is there any need for the street team-y add on clutter that social network based sites bring with it?
Plus Youtube It’s as good as any try before you buy resource. It might be a bit on the messy side – avoiding all those mobile phone recorded live tracks/college boy covers and fanboy slideshows is a pain – but most things youre after are a quick one/two word search entry away. I was checking out tracks from Jim Sullivan’s UFO earlier today on it which worked out better than the 30 sec clips on the label website, trying to find an official website/myspace, or messing around with torrents. All I wanted was to listen to a few tracks, I can do without knowing who his Top 8 friends are.
I think MySpace forgot the ancient proverb, keep it simple stupid. Twitter knows this very well, you post tweets of no more than 140 characters, follow other people and that’s about it. Facebook also keep things relatively simple and easy to use. I think I’ve given up on MySpace now, it’s just trying to be like Facebook and failing miserably. Bandcamp, Soundcloud and Breaking Tunes also know how to keep things simple. Soundcloud seem to be the best at this. You post tunes and follow other people who share music. I don’t think it’s up there with the community feel of Twitter but I think it’s getting there.
Anyone gone checking out a band on myspace recently? Notice how user-UNfriendly its new design has become? It’s as if they’re trying to get people to stop to use it! Agreed Colly.. no need to know who the top-8 friends are etc.. Breaking Tunes is a really good site to check out new Irish stuff. Clean, tidy presentation in one page. No bullsh*t ads to deal with. Soundcloud is great. Not too keen on LastFM..
I briefly made the point here on a blog last week Jim, I think the future of this whole thing will revolve around Facebook. I’d predict they’ll move to start ‘integrating’ other services into their business, music streaming potentially being one of them. I can’t exactly say how yet, but look to Google at what they’re doing (producing android ipad computers and iphones among other ventures) at present to see what I reckon Facebook are going to do. They’ll drive to keep the growth of company turnover steady (what corp doesn’t?) and in order to do so will opt to go down the integration road.. This ain’t some sort of conspiratorial rant, I’m merely pointing out that they hold all the cards and it’s hard to see them getting smaller in the coming years.. Just imagine Facebook striking a deal with LastFM (even buying it out..) or similar service in two years time and their services link in..
Some classic beats for a monday morning for anyone looking for a beat..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYV7FkoUNPY
Soundcloud seems to be going down a bit of a copyright spiral of late.. Seems they’re deleting alot of peoples music without notice due to copyright infringments. I know of few users that uploaded their own music to it and it either wouldn’t let them up it or is was taken down, eventhough its completely 100% the users own original material.. It’s going to be interesting to see where they go with this
I find myspace overcluttered and not very user-friendly in the same way that Facebook is. As JJ said K.I.S.S. should be the mot du jour when it comes to sites like this. A short bio, some pics perhaps, tour dates and most importantly the tunes! I’m sure that as technology strategically advances we’ll see other contenders to the throne when it comes to social networking. Personally if there’s a band i’m curious about i’ll go to Grooveshark and give the tunes a listen. My logons, passwords and typing fingers servce to furnish my ears!!
By the way, anyone at CW Stoneking at the weekend in the Workman’s Club? Couldn’t get tickets and am just curious as to how the gig was?
Interesting points, folks (as I expected)
Niall – Ping to me is a little like Muzu – I rarely hear anyone talking about it! Certainly, I disabled it on my iTunes right away. I don’t want to be browbeaten into using something
Eoghan – back in 2005 when News Corp bought Myspace, it WAS seen as money well spent – no-one saw Facebooka and Twitter coming down the tracks! That’s how fast things change and are changing. But I think you have hit the nail on the head with the comment “Do we just want a site to collate these things together already?” – we already know what we like about Twitter and Soundcloud and Bandcamp so do we just need or want one site which does all of these things? Or are we happy to go to these different sites for different needs?
colly – it’s interesting that people are v happy to put up with Youtube’s clunky design because it does exactly what they need, while they’re past putting up with Myspace’s terrible design and navigation.
JJ – agreed – as colly points out, Youtube kept it simple and are reaping the benefits. Myspace’s various redesigns mean less and less people are prepared to go there. Yet for all this, most bands still consider their Myspace page to have some sort of value as online real estate.
halandor – I’d be very interested to know WHY Facebook would go to music. They already have 600 million plus users who are there for reasons which are not primarily music – why would they go down the music route after all this time?
carnie – yes, I hear you – I got a rake of takedown notices before Xmas for tracks which were all freely given by labels to blogs and websites. Right hand of the labels doesn’t know what the left hand did.
Hi Jim,
The beauty about myspace, which twiitter or facebook simply does not have, was the integration between social networking users, with a personal page, and bands with a promo page. Back a few years ago, we used to be able to go on Friend Request binges, targeted by area. so say we were playing in cork, dublin, or even waterford, we could target people specifically from that area, who were in to bands that we were in to – i.e fans of biffy clyro etc..
It was relatively simple to build a fanbase on myspace as a result of this, meaning you could get several hundred plays a day by marketing yourself to the users of the social networking aspect – some people liked being requested, some people didnt, but the option was there.
Thats the problem at the moment – as good as breaking tunes is, there is no way to literally force people into listening to your stuff. Facebook is ok, but again, with a band profile, you cannot request people you are not friends with personally to ‘like’ your page – a severe limitation for bands. Also you cannot contact a band through their page on facebook, unless they have an email address listed. What I have noticed about this is the process of say booking a gig in cork has changed, I cant search for bands from cork with similar influences of mine from cork, and message them asking will they play to help with promotion within the same site.
Myspace was a unique thing in that it properly combined a fanbase made up of personal profiles, with band profiles. I think what a majority of bands are now leaning towards is their own website – where they can manage their own content, integrate the other social networking mediums such as twitter/facebook or soundcloud. It essentially allows you to create an EPK that you manage entirely.
With all the free online instructions available, and a little knowledge a band could have a website online in a couple of days – but fully customised to how they want to market themselves. They can then use the respective social networking sites to aim people towards it.
*shimmies in meekly trying not to interrupt the flow of conversation*
Should that to be “VoLdemort” (complete with ‘L’) in the second sentence of the second paragraph?
David McG – thanks, have corrected that (and appreciate your quiet aside)
Fergus – the thing is most bandsites should be like that but it’s the way in which Myspace acted as a direction to other bands which was perhaps it’s most useful function
kevin – hope you are well, fellow! Yes, agree with you 100% – when I was in Brazil in 2008 on a trade mission, I met a band from Porto Allegre who had booked a 3 month European tour via Myspace. They’d hooked up with like-minded bands, saw what venues they were playing and got in touch. It is, as you say, that social networking aspect which is missing from every new tech play which tries to MySpace-like. While I can see why bands want to go their own way and control their own sites, I wonder is the social networking aspect of MySpace something bands now feel they can delegate to other sites (Facebook etc) – ie sites which do the social networking thing better than Myspace ever did. And at the same time, would a standalone music site which took the best bits of the other sites be able to corner some of the market?
Excuse me for being the Devil’s Advocate here and taking a different stance on the matter but do we really need another social networking website to join? It seems we have plenty of music services already with Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, Spotify, Bandcamp etc., not to mention various blogging sites, email lists and band websites. The need for another social network to join, maintain and keep up on seems somewhat redundant.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the use of Facebook etc. for band and event promotion is that at times it can be overhyped and overrated. Given that on average that to work out how many people a Facebook Event will bring in based on Facebook alone is the number who say they will attend divided by a factor of between 5 and 10 and just because a page has 1,000 fans doesn’t mean they’ll sell 1,000 CDs or get 1,000 to a gig, it feels like it’s time to come off the computer, stop focusing on the Hot New Technology and do things the old fashioned way: Work with the music media, meet people in real life, tour and tour hard, network with actual people and build up a contact list, etc.
I’ve noticed that the more impersonal a form of communication and reaching out to people is, the less likely it will have an effect on a given person and the less likely they are to take note or respond. The more real these things are, the more fulfilling and engaging it is. Sure, the net reaches a lot of people, but it’s sitting at home in front of the PC and not part of something happening, like the chance to buy a musician drinks after a good gig and the warm glow of being able to name-drop and claim you met person X at night Y.
Now, I’m not saying that the net isn’t useful as I’m an avid Facebook user and use it to make connections with bands through gig photography. But I think you’ll agree that bands could do a lot more for themselves by focusing on real things and real life rather then a bunch of interconnected wires and machines.
JMM – no, please, all devil’s advocacy welcome. I’m very much on the fence about whether we need a new MySpace but I’m interested in teasing out what made the site a winner in the first place – so much so that Rupe Murdoch opened his chequebook – why it failed and if it’s a case that it needs to be replaced or if ALL its USPs are replicated elsewhere.
And, as you point out, just because someone says they’re going to do something on Facebook does not mean this will transfer into real action (see the Rubberbandits and their chase for the Xmas Number 1 in December).
@8 “I’d be very interested to know WHY Facebook would go to music”
If in future they envision a way of making money from it, then they may well go towards integrating a music service among other services.. Expansion of any commercial enterprise is everything. Over the next couple years they’re going to reach saturation point with their users, or at least the numbers of those signing up for new accounts will start to level out. What then? Imagine for example they launch their own browser, like Google have done with Chrome. And that such browser’s home page keeps you logged into Facebook.. The browser could contain any number of handy extra features, among them an in-built LastFM player or whatever.. Keeping people online and logged in helps generate more advertising revenue..
Of course.. All of that is ifs, buts, coulds and maybes.. Thing is though, Facebook are going to be the big players that all other platforms will want to connect with because of its consumer base. When it comes to modern technology and its usability, the key buzzword for all brainstorming shitheads getting paid millions by the corpos is ‘integration’.. Who knows.. It’s fun to wax lyrical on though. I’m obsessed with the concept of Facebook, again not from a conspiratorial point of view (they’re out to control us all, you know..) but just the power it potentially holds..
Whereas I used to go to Myspace and throw in the name of a band I wanted to check out, I now find myself using the Hype Machine. Best browser-based music network on the go at the mo in my eyes. You’ll always find new tracks there quicker than on Youtube / Last.fm / Spotify / We7 / etc. It’s pretty low on features, which is part of the charm.
Though it has some basic social features it’s not in the same category as Mysapce eta al… I use Last.fm for scrobbling and event listings, Bandcamp for the local downloads, and Soundcloud whenever I need to embed some audio.
As said above, each service has it niche, no one replacement will encompass all that Myspace used to be.
For me Youtube is the most important vehicle for music (assuming your not getting much airplay) at the moment………….though no doubt something will eventually and come along and supersede it.
One report in the second half of last year in Music Week stated that something like 29% of all videos watched on Youtube are now music related which must be a truly enormous figure!
For sure most of those views will be for the latest Lady Gaga shitefest or bland r&b cribs wannabe but it still provides a great opportunity for people to stumble across new music imho.
I dont think people will want another social networking site – the closest at the moment to what myspace used to be would be last.fm – but I find that it is more suited to marketing your music to people globally who want to listen to music in the comfort of their own home rather than a listener who wants to go to whelans to see new music live.
Facebook would be fantastic for bands if they allowed certain functionality that myspace had – such as the ability to friend request, or message your fans privately – but I think that facebook developers realised that thos was the reason that myspace failed. You couldnt log in to your profile, even as a band without being absolutely swamped with “Hey we’re a folk band from milwaukee, come check out our stuff” friend requests.
What has made facebook so successful is that you as a user have full control over what kind of content is viewable on your profile, if you dont want to be pestered by bands, you cant be.. So i believe that if facebook adjust their thinking to suit music more, that will be the beginning of the end of the site
My opinion unfortunately, is that a social networking site such as myspace will not exist again – you wont get 5 billion people signing up to another site, and facebook wont change. This leads me back to bands having to have their own space now
- a domain costs 20 euro for a year.. Everyone knows somebody that can build a website! Each one of the previously mentioned social networking sites now offers pre-generated code that you can embed on to your own site.. Our homepage for instance has widgets from soundcloud, which allows free downloads without actually having to go to, or be a member of soundcloud, and a twitter feed for quick news.
We were able to release or last single using our own domain, and again using a free “click like or tweet to download” widget. Vimeo offer decent inbuilt video players, code already written – you just have to tell it what colour scheme you want. Also at a gig, its great to be able to say “have a look at (plug) http://www.iphoenix.ie, where you download our music, check out our news, photos, videos etc…”.
We dont run the risk of this medium falling out of fashion like myspace did, and facebook might.. If a new social media decides to show itself, chances are it will have a nice widget that we can embed very quickly to stay with the times. Also with not much knowledge you can have stats running on your site that allow us see where a majority of our visits are coming from – down to the county in ireland.
just food for thought really..
does anyone know is there is a site that streams your music in better quality than 128kbps? soundcloud has some kind of weird compressor that makes your music sound tinny. its a real problem with all the streaming sites, but most people dont seem to mind that theyr missing out on most of the frequencies…
pretty much everything JJ said there in the initial post is on the ( or my ) money . KISS is the web mantra . course this is easy to say – very hard to execute . the digital world has endless boundaries so its so natural to complicate and clutter , merely because you can .
so instead of a myspace monopoly of the music landscape ala what Facebook is aiming for it the social interaction one – we’ve loads of choice – bandcamp for bands, soundcloud for the electronic peeps, lastfm for the nerds, and youtube for rest . and plenty more besides. so its a cluttered landscape there, especially if you are a band or label, you’ve a total headfuck nowadays keeping all this shite updated. myspace as is, still has a place , but even in the last year they’ve spectacularly messed things up . i too used it with my industry hat on for various things, but im finding that alot of acts arent updating there pages, or its hard to find when they are playing etc etc . web networks are like big waves of energy moving too and fro all over the place and its all about momentum . i think the tide is going out on myspace, and they’ve no idea how to pull it back.
to answer the question i think your asking though jim , is there a need for a music networking site thats all encompassing and easy to use for fans, bands, labels, PR, media and the rest – and that works but doesnt exist . well…yeah !
An unforgiving feature of Myspace band pages, and one which rarely gets mentioned publicly, is the ‘Plays Today’ counter on the music player. It can be pure torture for new or up and coming bands to have a public number put on the interest they’re generating from day to day. These numbers aren’t a scientific guide, of course, nor will everyone visiting the page give a damn about them. But they do give an impression, rightly or wrongly, about how the band is doing. Several artists have confessed to me over the years how haunted they’ve felt by this daily count. Very hard to build up buzz and mystique around your act when the number of daily plays is humiliatingly low. I’ve even heard of bands fiddling the numbers by revisiting their own page over and over again every day. Talk about a waste of energy.
Tellingly, there’s no such feature on bandcamp or breakingtunes. The visitor is invited to listen to the song not the number. Quite a relief for the artist, I’d imagine.
I wrote an EP the year before last and opened a myspace page for the band but once i happened upon Bandcamp that all changed . The first time i heard of it was in an interview with The Cast Of Cheers where they said they uploaded their album on it and made it available as a free download.
Bandcamp is far more user friendly than myspace i find. There are more things you can do with the design and layout of the page, its less cluttered and you can make your music available to download ( for free ot charge for it ) in a lot of different forms, Mp3,Flac, etc. You also have access to stats( amount of listens, when, from where etc ) that are far more detailed that anything myspace has…
I started a new album last August and instead of just doing the whole thing and uploading it like i did with the EP on myspace i just uploaded a song at a time and then remixed as i saw fit ( as no one knew i was using the site i could just use it like that ) . I found it was way more managable to get a record done. I have 8 songs done now so nearly there.
So i lost interest in myspace some time ago, soundcloud doesnt have the design features i want either and the layout is not what i need .Bandcamp all the way for me !!!
@18 “soundcloud has some kind of weird compressor that makes your music sound tinny. its a real problem with all the streaming sites, but most people dont seem to mind that theyr missing out on most of the frequencies…”
interesting point.. never noticed cos i’m always on shitty laptop speakers when checking stuff on soundcloud, never goes through my proper speakers.. will check it out.
was reading a blogpost by a guy who owns a studio in london there a few months ago (can’t remember where, sorry).. he had spent a six-figure sum getting his live room treated (adjustable panelling in the roof, that kind of thing) and was bemoaning the loss of audio quality in the modern age.. everyone’s listening to rubbish mp3s, through rubbish speakers and useless ipod headphones. no-one’s really bothered paying attention to fidelity because they don’t know the difference according to him. and apparently it was all started with that infamous master of oasis’ first album where they compressed the shite out of it just for loudness. since then the whole industry has been on a slippery slope with the loudness race. anyway, point is this guy reckons we’re going to see the death of big studios because 1.the big money isn’t around any more.. 2.us consumers don’t care.. 3.everyone has bought into the loudness race, so all the efforts of producing super-high quality audio go out the window when it gets to the mastering suite..
i fucking care i have to say.. without getting snobby, the difference between listening to a vinyl (and also modern classical recordings where they don’t compress and ruin fidelity) and a digital/cd copy of a typical rock album is huge. when the department of eagles record came out first i bought it on cd.. six months later a housemate bought it on vinyl and i was gobsmacked by the difference, it was like a different record the way the instruments had so much space and definition in the speakers.. shit quality listening experience is an unfortunate price to have to pay for our current freedoms with music and music sharing it seems..
also.. any mp3 encoding adds dithering or background noise to a file to compensate for the frequencies it removes.. maybe we’ll just have to wait til broadband goes to four thousand meg download speeds and hard drives have infinity storage, then we can all share wavs and look back at mp3s with a nostalgic snigger..
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned ReverbNation – most of the bands I know have switched from MySpace to that space.
@22 ‘shit quality listening experience is an unfortunate price to have to pay for our current freedoms with music and music sharing’.
Halandor, you just put into words a feeling I couldnt explain (expletives are great!)
Thats one of the main reasons I dont like You tube as a music-finder. Sound quality very sporatic and tends to be slightly better if you throw millions at it. Also you tube is 90% about the video, the music is secondary…
I liked Myspace before they changed it, though poor visually. Liked the limitations of tunes you could listen to, just enough of a taster for buying albums and such….Find it useful for exploring Irish made music sometimes. Though with the changes, its a pity they didnt take the opportunity to simplify it and improve the visuals. Probably why facebook has been successful, its much easier.
However, my sis who has been using facebook for years thinks it has already hit its peak and is on a decline in terms of personal interaction. It seems to be fashionable as a business tool at the moment, which is probably bouying the figures up. I wonder if it is here to stay, or will something else come along and take over.
Or http://www.bobcom.com? It even has it’s own music series starting on Channel 4 soon. Supposedly it’s going to outdo all those mentioned above. Have you seen the rate that people like me can sell our music? It’s better than I’ve seen anywhere and believe me I’ve checked!!!
I wonder if it is here to stay, or will something else come along and take over.
Finola – I think it’s the latter, tbh. That’s what the history of technology tells us – the large companies will have their hey-day and then, people will move onto the next big thing. Look at the various internet browsers. Look at the search engines. Indeed, look at the early social networking sites like Bebo. Another site will come on and the crowd will flock there.