Once the world's largest social-networking service and an essential tool for musicians, MySpace has fallen upon hard times, but I'm encouraged by one of the new services the company announced Wednesday.
The MySpace Artist Dashboard is a new free tool for any artist with a music profile page on the site. For artists, it offers demographic information about the people who are visiting your site, and a breakdown of what they're doing there. The geographic data could be particularly useful for small touring bands to help plan their routes. I was also encouraged by the statement from MySpace Music President Courtney Holt, who's been running the company's music initiatives for a couple years now: "Whether you're a small-town garage band, an emerging indie, or a well-established act, our ultimate goal is to provide the right mix of tools and real-time data to help you gain a deep understanding of who your fans are and how best to reach them." That's exactly what MySpace should be focusing on.
An example version of the new MySpace Artist Dashboard. The Black Eyed Peas probably don't need this feature--they have teams of marketers working for them--but your band might.
Unfortunately, the other new piece, a music video service, will languish in obscurity as part of the misguided MySpace Music site. I've always argued that creating a special MySpace Music site for major label acts, and shutting out the unsigned and indie artists that made MySpace in the first place, was a tragic mistake. Now MySpace is perpetuating the exact same mistake with MySpace Music Videos.
Here's an example. The Curious Mystery--a great Seattle band that recently signed with indie label K Records--has a new video out for their song "Black Sand." It's available on their MySpace page. But if you run a search for "The Curious Mystery" or "Black Sand" on the Music Videos hub, this video doesn't show up. That's a failure. (Overall, MySpace still needs a lot of help with music search.)
So MySpace Music Videos is trying to focus on the big numbers--big bands, lots of hits, big advertising bucks. But fans already know where to watch videos from famous artists--it's called YouTube--and therefore have no particular reason to check out the MySpace Music Video hub. The fun of MySpace used to be that your roommate's band could appear right alongside names like Radiohead, and you could surf easily between content from all types of acts. Until MySpace Music stops distinguishing between big and small artists, it will remain irrelevant.
And in case you're wondering, yes, you can find The Curious Mystery's new video by searching YouTube.
Free, on-demand streaming music is a rising tide: since the start of 2009, I've covered relatively new services like Spotify and Just Hear It, and there are plenty of established players like MySpace Music, Imeem, and Grooveshark.
Listen to Michael Jackson's music on Michael Jackson's official Web site. What a novel idea!
(Credit: Sony Music, Michael Jackson)Instead of trying to stop the tide, Sony Music has wisely embraced it: starting today, the company will introduce streaming music players on the Web sites of its most popular artists, including popsters like Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, and Jacko himself. It makes perfect business sense: instead of letting some third party like Imeem sell advertisements against high-demand music, Sony can sell or display its own ads.
Of course, they couldn't make it too easy--finding the audio on Michael Jackson's site took a few clicks, including one that forced me to identify my country, and the songs were embedded in the Sony-specific MyPlay player, which is an interesting piece of technology but only lets you create playlists with songs from other artists with MyPlay players. More generally, I wonder if it's too late for these label-specific initiatives--I'm sure plenty of hardcore Britney fans have her Web site bookmarked, but most music listeners probably prefer to use services that let you compile lists from multiple artists on multiple labels.
Sony is also adding lyrics to these artists' sites, provided by the company's own Gracenote subsidiary. Excellent move. I can't believe it's taken this long, given the lack of decent lyrics sites out there. In fact, I still don't understand the reluctance to publish lyrics online--what are people going to steal? What money is the artist or copyright owner losing? Kudos for Sony for taking a baby step toward ending this silliness.
Wired's Epicenter blog has the skinny on why MySpace Music failed to create any big waves when it launched. A lot of mistakes were made, including an unclear Web address and lack of any independent music. But I think it boils down to something fairly simple: the designers of the service were focused on the wrong audience. MySpace envisioned the site as an online showcase for major acts on major labels. The labels, anxious for any help navigating the file-trading era, were excited. But nobody bothered to consider why users visit MySpace, and what they might want from a music service on the site. Consequently, playlists were hard to create and share. There was only a superficial connection between pre-existing artists' pages and the new Music pages. Instead of a community of music fans, MySpace Music looked suspiciously like a bunch of billboards.
Listen to the title track to hear what Neil thinks of digital downloads...and bloggers.
(Credit: Neil Young via MySpace Music)MySpace Music has apparently moved to fix a lot of these problems, and when I checked the site today for the new Neil Young album "Fork in the Road"--available there as an exclusive until April 7--I found it to be fine for the task at hand. Then again, why couldn't Neil have posted these songs on his own Web site? If it weren't an exclusive, I'm not sure I'd think to check MySpace first, or at all, to hear these songs.
I think a similar problem hampered Microsoft's September 2006 launch of the first Zune player. Its most interesting differentiating factor from the market-leading iPod was its built in Wi-Fi connection. But the only thing users could do with it was transfer songs to one another, and those songs could only be played three times or for three days before they expired. In other words, Microsoft gave up too much control over its one differentiating feature to content owners. Better to go back to the drawing board and launch stronger with things like Wi-Fi connectivity to the Marketplace than to draw the ire of customers and scorn of reviewers and end up stuck with a tainted brand for the next few years. (The latest Zune software and service are pretty cool, but nobody knows it--just check out the comments every time I post about Zune.)
Like I told an entrepreneur I met at South by Southwest who was asking me for guidelines for the next big music start-up: concentrate on helping music listeners solve a problem, or do something they couldn't do before. Frame your company around listeners, not artists, not venues, not managers, not promoters, not labels. Listeners.
iPod: lets you carry thousands of songs with you. iTunes: makes it easy to get songs from CDs onto your computer and iPod. Pandora: gives you the "surprise" element of radio, but tuned more to your taste. Shazam: figures out what song's playing right now. Yes, it's possible to build a viable business catering to artists, particularly the emerging "middle class" who would be happy to to sell tens of thousands instead of tens of millions of albums. But there are a lot more listeners than artists, and they're willing to spend money--or at least look at advertisements--if you help them do something they couldn't do before.
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A quick note from the continuing Yahoo drama: today the company agreed to sell off Launchcast, its streaming music service, to CBS. (Disclosure: CBS is the publisher of News.com.) This continues Yahoo's movement out of the music biz--it sold its subscription service to RealNetworks back in February.
If it keeps going at this rate, CBS will have to add an ear to its logo.
More interesting than Yahoo's exit is the buyer. Launchcast now sits alongside Last.fm and AOL Radio (which is best-loved on the iPhone) in CBS's online radio arsenal. According to this report in All Things Digital, Launchcast will become more like AOL Radio, focusing primarily on pre-programmed playlists and Webcasts of terrestrial radio stations, while Last.fm will remain the company's flagship property for user-generated playlists.
It's interesting that CBS still sees a lot of opportunity in preprogrammed (top-down) online radio. By way of comparison, look at News Corp's recent launch of MySpace Music, which is focused on the idea that users will hunt down their favorite artists and songs and then assemble playlists (bottom up). CBS's approach makes sense--you might as well appeal to all segments of the listening audience, and some Internet users simply don't have the time to bother with custom playlists, or even with recommendation-driven services like Last.fm and Pandora.
The run-up to the holiday season always begins in September, and while I was overseas with no Internet access, the music and technology industries kept on churning. Fortunately for me, nothing's really changed. To wit:
SanDisk, in collaboration with the four major labels, announced a new physical format for albums called SlotMusic. You'll be able to pay between $7 and $10 and get a full album on a MicroSD card, which you'll then be able to plug into compatible cellphones or MP3 players to begin playing the MP3 files encoded at 320kbps. This one boggles me. If you need a physical artifact, CDs still exist, they play in billions of devices (car, computer, home stereo), they offer much higher quality sound, they have liner notes, and anybody with enough tech knowledge to know what a MicroSD card is can certainly figure out how to rip a CD to their hard drive and transfer the songs to an MP3 player. So why would I pay a dime for a tiny, easy-to-misplace "album" that offers lower-quality sound and compatibility with far fewer devices? Next.
MySpace Music launched with the support of the four major labels. This one has a huge built-in userbase, but the distribution model's all wrong: label-driven and top-down, unlike Imeem, where users post all the music. If I want to hear a song on demand--to see if I like a particular band, or just to satisfy a moment of curiosity--I'll go to the site with the largest selection, which is likely to be Imeem. If I want to buy a song, I'll do it in the store affiliated with my MP3 player of choice--iTunes, Zune Marketplace or (if I must) Amazon MP3. So what's the point of this service again, other than a too-little too-late attempt by the labels to capitalize on the MySpace name? Next.
Google and T-Mobile announced and demonstrated the first phone based on Google's Android operating system, the T-Mobile G1, manufactured by HTC. It's an obvious bid to compete in the consumer smartphone market, which was first tapped by Apple with the iPhone (before that, smartphones were generally business devices--think Blackberry and Windows Mobile). To compete in that space, there has to be an iTunes equivalent, so it's going to ship with a mobile music player that connects to a mobile version of Amazon's MP3 store. Call me a skeptic. I've tried the Amazon store and found it to be an exercise in frustration. So without having seen the G1 in person, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that, at launch, the Amazon/Android app's going to fall way short of iTunes when it comes to ease of use. Give it a couple revs to catch up, but at launch, this won't change the competitive picture.
I spoke with Mercora founder Srivats Simpath about three years ago as the company was looking for possible partnership opportunities with Microsoft. At the time, the company's vision and proposed business model seemed a little muddy. Music was involved. There would be some sort of peer-to-peer sharing system, but somehow this would be legal. To differentiate itself from the popular but illegal file-sharing systems used by most of the world at that time, Mercora would have a strong social-networking aspect, with users recommending or voting on songs. I don't remember exactly how the company expected to make money, but I recall telling them that charging subscription fees to end-users is a hard way to go.
If you can't explain your online music service in a sentence, it's too complicated.
Yesterday, the company--which changed its name to Social.fm last year--announced it's out of business. Without knowing exactly what went down, I'll just say that Mercora's was one of many confusing pitches that I've heard over the years. (I sympathize with Rafe Needleman's frustration.)
So, in hopes of turning a negative into a learning experience, here are some very general rules for digital music start-ups:
1. Focus. If you can't describe your service in a single sentence, you're doing too much. Think of the few successes in the digital music space we've seen so far. iTunes Music Store: buy songs and they'll automatically transfer to your iPod the next time you connect it. MySpace (from a music standpoint): people can learn about and sample musicians that their friends and peers like. CDBaby: online CD store for unsigned bands. Pandora: builds a custom radio station for you based on your musical taste.
2. Uniqueness. We've already got plenty of choices for downloading and streaming music--what can you offer that's different? Social networking won't cut it because it's so subject to network effects--the more people are on one, the more useful it becomes. MySpace has been doing social networking-plus-music since 2005 and consistently draws more than 100 million users per month. How will you convince anyone to migrate to your brand new service when all their friends are still on MySpace? I'm not saying it's impossible, but you better have something unique.
3. Music listeners are cheap. This is a hard one to swallow, but any time I'm listening to a pitch or reading about a new online music service and the idea of fees--particularly monthly subscription fees--comes up, I immediately think "fail." It may not be moral or fair, but any fee-based music service has to compete against a huge amount of free music that's easily available to anybody with an Internet connection. So what's the answer? Music listeners are also lazy! You can charge money if--and only if--you offer a significantly easier experience than we could get by frequenting file-sharing sites and other free sources (not to mention ripping CDs from our friends). Again, iTunes is instructive: you pay to download the songs directly into the same app you use to transfer them to your iPod. Saving a few steps is worth $0.99.
A quick aside: musicians are even cheaper, and well-attuned to suspect anything that smells like pay-to-play. Good luck with that.
4. Launch strong. On the day your site goes public, you better have enough capacity and bandwidth to accept all the curiosity seekers. Your site better be so easy to use that I don't have to read the FAQ. And most important, you better launch with all the content (that means licensing deals ahead of time) and features you promised--I feel so burned by Qtrax (just to pluck an example out of thin air) that I'll probably never write about the company again.
MySpace is essential for independent artists. Every band I've played with in the last five years has had a MySpace page, and it completely changed how we did things compared with the pre-Internet days. Getting gigs, maintaining mailing lists, fliering--all of those formerly labor-intensive tasks could be accomplished by sitting in front of a computer. One group I played with got 90 percent of our gigs through other bands on our friends list. Another had a couple dozen teenage fans who'd come to every all-ages show when they read about it on our MySpace page. (We were all in our late 30s and 40s and had no idea that ska would appeal to that demographic.)
A truly killer MySpace music service would let users buy downloads and merchandise from any act on the site.
(Credit: MySpace)But there was always a major gap: if we wanted to sell downloads, CDs, or anything else, we had to guide fans to another site or service, such as our own home page with a PayPal account or CDBaby.
Today, MySpace announced a deal with three of the four majors (EMI is sitting out for now) to offer DRM-free MP3 downloads, ringtones, and merchandise through the artist pages on MySpace. This is long overdue: the music industry needs to go where their fans already are, and with 30 million people regularly listening to music on the site, it's a mystery why the labels haven't tried to reach these folks before now.
But major label acts are a small part of the MySpace experience. The only reason you ask The Police or Death Cab to be your "friend" is to show off your impeccable taste to your real friends, the individuals and small-time artists who you're actually connected with. These are the folks who leave individualized comments on your page and send you instant messages, and their gigs appear right alongside Radiohead's on your home page. MySpace is the ultimate long tail site for musicians, where bar bands and small-town heroes can appear in the same context as the biggest bands in the world.
So I'm not sure that MySpace Music will be a game-changer. Fans of big bands already know where to buy merchandise--the band's Web site, or Amazon's CD section, or iTunes, or their local retail store. Sure, big fans who count major-label acts among their "friends" might now stay within MySpace to buy new songs from these bands, and some MySpace users might discover (and buy music from) new acts via friends of friends. But a lot of fans don't know (or care much about) the difference between major and independent artists, and might wonder why only some acts make their wares available for purchase. The inconsistency will be confusing, and drive users back to the traditional music-buying sites (or free file-trading services, which aren't going away).
The real game-changer comes when MySpace offers a full e-commerce store--downloads, CD sales, the works--to every artist with a musician's page on the site. That way, users would never have to leave the site to buy any music they heard on the site. The challenge would be building the infrastructure, but once things like billing and provisioning downloads are in place for the majors, it might not be much harder to set up a CDBaby-like system for everybody else.
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