"What the Fuck is Going On?" A musician's take on MySpace
thesoundofhumanlives.blogspot.com
thesoundofhumanlives.blogspot.com
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.
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.
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
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.
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
So yeah, give it a shot. Sounds like there's a market there if done well
If I had a band and didn't have time worry about the web much, I'd want to own a domain and pay someone 10 percent of our combined take to make it and keep it the way I want it. The more we make, the more they make.
TheSixtyOne? Lala? Bandcamp? All more elegant and more precise tools than MySpace ever was.
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.
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.
For some reason -- which I still don't really understand -- a lot of people got lured into believing that Myspace was a replacement for running a legitimate website under your own domain. And it's not. Really, truly not. But a lot of bands thought that, as long as they were on Myspace, they didn't need to do anything else (or in some case could even take their existing sites down).
I'm glad that people are finally figuring out that this was a bad idea. There's no problem with maintaining a presence on Myspace, Facebook, etc., if you're a band (in fact I think it's a really good idea), but it shouldn't be your only online presence. It's a lot safer to use those free services as traffic-drivers to your own domain than to depend on them exclusively.
Watch Facebook pages eventually add music and other content. Watch some light themeing appear for your personal page.
What Facebook is doing right is keeping people separated from things like bands and companies and going real slow on development and keeping control while they expand their userbase.
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).
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).
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.
That's why I say "Maybe the next generation, who grows up watching their parents using Facebook" ...
I bet between 2015-2020
Maybe not even that soon. I think things are getting entrenched. The mainstream switches more slowly than early adopters. Until the last few years, it's all been early adopters, and we've gotten used to things changing incredibly quickly. Also, there are strong network effects in play for Facebook, not so much for e.g. Google.
Their fb-connect integration is really great.
All that to say that the service doing well on facebook is just an application on the facebook platform, and one focused on fb-connect off facebook.com
That means it is currently all up for grabs. Any application could do the same thing. I don't think LaLa replaces the myspace experience because the fat middle and long tail of bands aren't curating the experience for the band themselves. Myspace is dwindling in popularity, with a replacement yet to be determined.