First apology for being very quite here lately…just loads of stuff going on at the moment. One of the projects I’m involved with has to do with live music so I’m searching the scene for some inspirations and while there are quite a lot of them, it looks like there are big wars coming…the behemoths are all gunning for each other’s territories.
With music being the strongest property / identity of myspace (myspace has positioned itself as the de facto spot for bands to self-promote) they have lots to loose at the moment. Rumours that MySpace is in the early stages of launching an online music venture with the four biggest record companies. It will be positioned (rather ambitiously) as an iTunes competitor. It looks like MySpace Music (working title) will provide ad-supported streaming music, in addition to a store that sells songs playable on portable devices, including Apple’s iPod.
On the other hand Facebook is biting myspace’s ass with a new music (and film?) service that enables bands to sell tickets, tracks and merchandise via Music Today. Tracks can also be streamed, with links to iTunes where users can purchase songs directly. Whats more interesting is the (still modest) migration of the scene towards facebook. Bands/artists can now have their own page on FB where users can become fans of artists, whose music can be rated and reviewed. While this is traditionally Myspace’s territory Facebook may gain fast on that position with helping hands — not just from iTunes or Music Today, but also from its active third-party developer community. As Myspace learning fast, it pays to be open.
Finally, a much smaller player but one that we need to pay attention to as it currently dominates Facebook’s music scene (think LastFM for the masses) is iLike. They recently launched a “news feed” for favorite artists. Users can now see exactly what their favorite artists are up to - when they go on tour, release new songs or videos, etc, the news is presented to them in the feed. Only few months ago, iLike had 4.5 million users of its Facebook application. Today they have 14 million! But more than half of their new members today are coming from their iLike.com site and other social networks - OpenSocial gave them access to Bebo, Hi5 and soon MySpace. Take a look at iLike U2 page within facebook - it has 1.9million fans (the U2 Facebook page has ‘only’ 160K fans!)
In this brave new world where it’s all about cultivating a devoted tribe of music and curating the connections between an artists and their fans this territory is open to anyone who can come with a good idea.
Read more here from the guru damn…this Seth is sharp…
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