…left of centre? well, yes, but also at these places (just as a recap, in case you missed some of them!)
Facebook
Reverb Nation
iLike
Last.fm
iSound (I’d pretty much forgotten that this one existed!)
MySpace
YouTube
and then just for buying stuff there’s
Cdbaby (there are a host of other MP3 stores linked from here).
iTunes
Emusic
Amazon.
….and also on Rhapsody, Napster and god-knows-where else!
Which of them do you use? Which sites are useful to you as a listener? Which sites have features that draw you in to spend time browsing for new music? It’s amazing that after all this time, there’s still nothing that can top Myspace, exposure-wise, shitty design or no shitty design. Last.fm is now definitely the go-to site for hearing music on demand, and emusic is my download site of choice, though the Amazon store is pretty kick-ass too..!
Which ones do you think will last? the Facebook fan-page thing doesn’t seem to have caught on all that much as yet, mainly because Facebook is ALL about connecting with people you know… I guess the artists need to do more interacting on there! Last.fm seem to have a really good thing going, and they are going to start doing subscription downloads too, it seems… What about myspace? The news about their open access API seems great if it works and we’re not just swamped with spam through it…
Thoughts please, bloglings. :o)
All great questions… I wish I had some answers. At the moment all I have are random observations about Last.fm, which is the latest of these sites that I’ve tried.
I discovered something very interesting about the way last.fm determines that a given artist is “similar” to another — it is based mostly on the number of listeners who listen to both artists (i.e., the more people who listen to both artists, the more likely the artists are to be considered “similar”). This seems to me to be very different than the method used by, say, Pandora, which (as I understand it) is based more on musical analysis.
I point this out because I suspect it might be a useful tool for artists — specifically, in the area of audience development. (E.g.: so now I know that people who listen to my music also listen to the Spice Girls (say) — so let me figure out a way to approach the broader audience of Spice Girls fans, to hopefully bring them into my audience as well… or something like that…)
As a listener, one of the things I find tricky about Last.fm is that if I stick with my listening trends du jour, the site doesn’t necessarily reflect my full identity as a music fan. So, for instance, I’m a huge Zappa fan — but that interest has been with me for a while, and at this point I know Zappa’s music well enough that I don’t feel driven to listen to it on a daily basis. So there hasn’t been a lot of Zappa entered into my last.fm listening history (since I’ve only been on the site for a month or so). Instead, what’s reflected there is stuff that I happen to be listening to a lot at the moment, but which may or may not eventually make it into my personal pantheon of “big influences.”
Obviously, that’s not a huge deal (and obviously, the listening history will more accurately represent my tastes as the data pool grows bigger) — but it seems significant given that the site is not only about personal explorations of music, but potentially creating relationships with other music fans based on shared tastes.
The reason the facebook hasn’t taken off (and is unlikely to in the future) is because facebook does nothing for music that myspace doesn’t already do a lot lot better. Facebook is seriously crash happy, regardless of which OS or browser you use.