Facebook Music will essentially be a way for musicians (or their labels) to create their own fan pages just like on MySpace, each with a separate sub-domain within Facebook. Facebook members will be able to join any artist’s network as a “fan.” This will be similar to joining a group, but centered around music. Members will be able to listen to streamed songs, watch videos, add music to their own pages, find out about upcoming tours, and meet other fans. Facebook is also supposedly working on sales widgets for these pages (to be introduced at a later date) so that artists can sell downloads directly through Facebook.
It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against MySpace, and if bands will move their web presence from MySpace to Facebook. Many bands don’t even have their own website these days, and prefer to just use their MySpace page as their “homepage”. This is really silly because you’re essentially giving MySpace all of your traffic, and making your fans look at all those banner ads.
As Christopher Penn said at Podcamp this weekend, you don’t want to build your house at the intersection of major highways, but you want to post billboards to direct traffic to your own home on the web. In other words, use these sites to promote your own website, but don’t give all of your content to them.
Ever since Facebook opened up it’s platform up to developers, we’ve seen a plethora of interesting apps created for Facebook. This was a brilliant move on the part of Facebook, because it means there is now a way for 3rd party developers to tap into a huge existing social network, one that is growing at a phenomenal rate:
- 350,000 new users per day
- 50 million users
- # of users double every 6 months
- average person spends 21.5 min on the site
- 65% come back the next day
It will be interesting to see what happens with Google’s OpenSocial which launches tomorrow. Apparently, it provides a common set of APIs for accessing social networking data.
If I’m building a social networking app for musicians/bands today, I don’t think I necessarily want to be tied to one particular platform which may go out-of-style tomorrow. Can anyone say Friendster?
Tags: facebookmyspace socialnetworking musicians bands google
You are so right
And it’s not only about musicians it’s about all of us on every social network. Why is all the data only stored there? Why can’t I export it? Why isn’t it stored somewhere I can control it.
And so on.
Not only that it’s maybe a privacy and control question, it’s also simply annoying to define all your information on each site again.
So looking forward to what OpenSocial brings and if it’s really a step in the right direction. From the press release at least I can just guess