there's no good social media site for music

[Angstrom]

Why do none of the social media sites manage to provide a decent low-rent nexus for musicians and audience.

Soundcloud is a fine place for musicians to post stuff, and link to it - but it's really just for musicians and DJs, not punters. It still doesn't have the same power that Myspace had to connect those two groups, because it was a place where the music makers and the punters hang out in the same space. Sure Myspace was fugly and terribly built, but it did serve a purpose. Many punters used to find new acts there, and it was a lot more musically integrated than any modern offering.

Soundcloud is not integrated with the audience & Facebook isn't either - most people just embed a souncloud or Youtube link - but it's untraceable by the band.

so, I was hoping that Google plus might be the long awaited replacement for Myspace, but it seems to be just a Facebook clone. With added "hide my friends from my boss" kind of privacy issues as the selling point. Boringness.
Well perhaps Myspace is the replacement for Myspace.

what are your thoughts on the Timberlake Myspace buyout?
all the quotes coming out of it are music-related, but I have no idea if that means "we look forward to trying to strike licensing deals with Warner and EMI", or if it means a return to the pleasantly low-rent flyers-mp3s-and-gigs-in-your-area version of Myspace which was initially popular.

thoughts?

[pepezabala]

I am quite happy with the mailing-list/facebook combo we use right now. Myspace was great for exploring music of your local scene and friends-network, but then again that just might have been due to the euphoria that it suddenly was possible technically and everyone used it nicely. When the promoters took over and the spamfest began I stopped looking at it. Fecebook ist at this point for me right now. I get so many Event-invitations on our band's facebook that I just stopped looking at any of them. Sad. In the beginning it was just interesting stuff from friends or friends of friends, now I suddenly get all this spam from promoters.

But we still continue to collect emailaddresses, make only one monthly mailing, trying to keep it funny and interesting for those who receive that, and that's just working fine - when we do a concert in Barcelona our fans and friends will know about it.

[Angstrom]

Yes, but surely you are looking at it from the producer/promoter point of view. Collecting and sending.
A punter would be more interested in a recommendation, discovery, subscription and discussion model.
When you describe the spamfest that raged through Myspace, imagine if that had been addressed. A social nexus which allows listeners to discover, rate and recommend music. Also allowing a two-way dialogue which is kept moderated through a slashdot/reddit vote-up/down collaborative filtering system. All very doable, but nobody has bothered to do it.

The existing sites are just so weak on interaction, there's nowhere that feels like it's built as an arena for both creators and consumers. It's on or the other.

[rbmonosylabik]

I think the best thing to do is have your own own site and thus, your own internet presence and just link people off any social network to your stuff. Social networks and their features are built according to their owner's priorities, and at some point you'll run into those limitations which often are dead ends or require a lot of work arounds to get past. Also, at some point they'll change or go down in flames like myspace, and that might mean all those Likes and Follows will go away and you'll have to start over in the next big site.

So, I think if we're serious about our music, we can come up with better solutions in our own space and find clever ways to get people on social networks there and involved. It just requires some more work than filling up a profile.

[beats me]

I think the only kind of site that would be successful at this would be one that is music producer first and social network second, and quite honestly fuck DJs altogether. They just muck things up.

I think virb was the best site for it's elegant simplicity and was heading in the right direction but they just couldn't get the traffic. I'm not really sure why.

Soundcloud is just ass ugly, and I'm sorry, but we're a visual species. The fact that they can make something so simplistic and yet ugly is astounding.

[Angstrom]

I think the only kind of site that would be successful at this would be one that is music producer first and social network second,

I don't agree there.
It's a buyers market out there, and what the casual listener really needs is to find content they might enjoy. The want to filter the bazillions of awful tracks down to the few they might like, "collaborative filtering" by using thousands of other dudes similar to you to vote up/down the music you might like requires an active social network of 'consumers'. Soundcloud completely omits that user feature - because it's an ego playground designed for 'music producers', it was designed by producers for producers. Not for end-customers.

In a gold rush - sell shovels.
they are selling shovels to idiot gold prospectors, or "producers"

The only people that go to a music producer site are other producers. Look at this forum, do you see any casual music listeners in here?

Music is about the audience not the makers. When I want to discover music I would prefer a 3rd party to filter it for me. Collaboratively. Something like Pandora, Jango or LastFM , but with the added benefit of allowing the originating artists to participate.

LastFM is soooo close - but their band namespace fuckup brings the whole house of cards down. Any bands with the same name all have to share and edit the same page !

I strongly believe that if they had fixed that they would have been the place for people to discover and form a relationship with a band.

As a side note: owning your own domain is no replacement for having a place in a shared music discovery environment. Your own domain is great for people who already know about you - but discovery comes before that part.

[perplex]

the music industry is saturated, and itunes is keeping it afloat.

there won't be any good social media site for music -- unless Ping finally gets off the ground

[Angstrom]

although you can see the industry as saturated (with content) that's not bad if you have a good filtering system. If the ocean is filled with creatures and you have the right tool to extract the type of fish you want - then the mass of content becomes a great thing. But without that method to find and get the music you desire - its just all too much.

In the old days there was a content filtering system which was flawed but functional - record labels and DJs . The A&R for a label would pick and polish the jewel from the crud, then the DJ would pick from that and play it to a crowd.

that system has dissolved, and nothing came in to replace it. I don't trust Apple to recommend me stuff - they'll just push Lady Gaga on me. To the large corporations they see a pool of listeners (their members) as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder - they sell the ear-time of the iTunes users to to deep pockets of EMI, Warners, BMG, etc. And these days those big publishers are only interested in product-music, very controlled and easy to make money off. No need for them to hunt for one amazing diamond of a talent when they can create a hundred boybands and make similar money.

So no, Ping is never going to be the answer. It's a terrible idea based on interfacing with publishing juggernauts, not based on music listeners and small-time makers.

[ollyb303]

I think virb was the best site for it's elegant simplicity and was heading in the right direction but they just couldn't get the traffic. I'm not really sure why.

Agreed. I liked Virb and had a nice page there until they decided to take it down and start charging.

[Spyro]

I dont think soundcloud is ugly but it lacks the social experience that myspace offered. But on the other hand soundcloud doesnt even want that i guess. Im also not really sure if a real bandwebsite is getting a lot of attention from potential fans. If I wanna check out my favorite bands i dont wanna "learn" to handle different kinds of sites over and over again. that was realy good about myspace. there was a certain degree of consistency.

[LoopStationZebra]

meh. Anything on this order would simply be doomed to fail; mostly because every arsewipe who's making electronic music is going to apply the following search tags to their bio:

dubstep
tarnce
house
deep house
massive house
neo house
hip hop
dance
ambient
industrial
electro
dnb

etc etc etc

It won't matter how fucking awesome the site is or how amazing it looks. You do a search and you'll end up with the same MIASMA of SHIT that you've got now with any other site.

[LoopStationZebra]

I mean, maybe some brainiac will invent a fancy algorythm that would actually listen to people's tracks and apply the proper labels. Good luck with that.



Hell, I'd be happy if there were a site in which you could at least get an honest listing of LOCAL artists to support. The problem? Too many artists feel the insane need to list places like 'Mars', 'Jupiter's Ass Hat', or 'The Other Side of the World' as their base of operations.

[Angstrom]

tagging is actually a useless way of promoting an artist. I mean : what the hell would you tag Amon Tobin as ? Nu-Jazz, breakbeat and Downtempo?
blargh

nah, that's not how a decent system works, what they do is profile the listeners and see what other listeners similar to themselves have liked in categories. They then ask the listener to agree or disagree with the selection. That's collaborative filtering.
Categorise the people, determine relationships between music and people.

the relationships are determined not by transient nomenclature like "techno", but by relationship as determined by types of user.
Brian Eno is deduced to be related to John Hassel, Aphex Twin and David Toop. Because certain people often listen to those particular things together.

Brian Eno is not tagged as 'ambient', or 'art rock' because they are transitory labels and therefore pretty useless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

Collaborative filtering is a method of making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting preferences or taste information from many users (collaborating). The underlying assumption of the CF approach is that those who agreed in the past tend to agree again in the future. For example, a collaborative filtering or recommendation system for television tastes could make predictions about which television show a user should like given a partial list of that user's tastes (likes or dislikes).[1] Note that these predictions are specific to the user, but use information gleaned from many users. This differs from the simpler approach of giving an average (non-specific) score for each item of interest, for example based on its number of votes.

[LoopStationZebra]

Yes, I know. A sliver more worthwhile than tagging, but not by much.

Otherwise known as 'Things You Might Like - or that WE Recommend - But That Ultimately You'll Find Revolting'.



In fact, the majority of artists I love were folks I simply stumbled across by pure chance. There's something cool about that kind of discovery vs something an algorithm has sorted for me. Kinda like randomly meeting a hot chick at the park vs having your mum set you up with a friend of a friend's daughter.

[evaodland]

I use facebook for one one on one contact...with personal friends...and music acquaintances.

Soundcloud I use to distribute tracks to facebook to DJ friends who might want to add them to their sets...
lis
Ableton I use (hehehe for more heinous purposes...bwhahahaha)

there will not really be one social music location...that ended when MySpace got stupid and slow....

Back in the day the best model was mp3.com that was very cool...but it was killed by Vivendi. I actually use to get checks from mp3.com....
if it was left alone there would be no beatport, no iTunes...mp3.com was too dangerous for the established music industry.