I've been checking out a new social-networking site called SuperFan, and I think it could eventually become an interesting resource for music fans. But only if they make it easier to post and share content about favorite bands.
SuperFan is a bit like Facebook, only organized more around your likes and dislikes than around your friends.
If you've used Facebook, MySpace, Imeem, or any of the other countless social-networking sites out there, the drill will be familiar: enter your information to create a profile (here's mine), invite your friends, then engage in various activities like updating your status and uploading video and photos.
The key difference is that SuperFan is organized around the stuff you really like--movies, TV shows, sports teams, and--most relevant to me--music. Once you've created your profile page, you can run searches on particular musicians and albums, and declare yourself a fan. There are multiple different levels, the top being a SuperFan. Once you become a SuperFan of a particular artist--say, Roger Waters--you can embed YouTube videos, upload photos, create quizzes, and so forth. You basically become the maintainer of a fan site about your favorite artists and albums.
The template's pretty simple today--I'd like to see the ability to embed other videos, and even upload MP3 files like I can do on Imeem--but the idea has potential. If enough fans sign up and participate, SuperFan artist pages could become a go-to destination for musical information: instead of going to a band's home page or MySpace page, which tend to be strictly promotional, or to a Wikipedia entry, which tends to be pretty dry, you could go to a page that's lovingly curated by a fan.
But here's the catch. You can become a Fan of as many artists or albums as you want for free, but becoming a SuperFan--where you can actually populate a page with content--requires credits. You get some for free just by signing up, but to declare yourself a fan of a really popular group, like Led Zeppelin, you need to earn additional credits by creating content for other pages, or buy them with PayPal or by such as Netflix.
That seems like a bit of a hassle to me. As a music fan, I prefer Imeem's approach--while it's not as well-organized, there's no barrier to posting content, which means that it's easy to find just about anything you're looking for. And as a social-networking user, I'll probably stick with Facebook, where my friends are today.
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Both TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider posted stories this week about how MySpace is in big trouble. Traffic's down, users aren't spending much time at the site, Google hates its current ad deal that's up for renewal this year, and the relatively new CEOs are apparently planning to lay off up to 50 percent of the company--another 750 people--to save the company.
What happened? I remember when MySpace was the site of choice for musicians and music fans to keep track of their local scenes, and it seemed to have a pretty strong lock on general-purpose social networking until Facebook came along. Now, it looks like one big electronic billboard, and the only people who care about it are band managers and publicists trying to get "adds" for their artists so they can sell these acts up the chain to club bookers, radio stations, and record labels. There was always a commercial aspect to MySpace, but it's overshadowed everything else: Fox Interactive seems to have killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and covered its corpse with blinking Christmas lights spelling the name of the latest disposable major label act.
I exaggerate, but not much. If MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta wants to save the business, here are several steps he should take as soon as possible.
Get back to your core mission. What am I supposed to do at MySpace? I know what I used to do--I used to follow bands to find out when they were playing in my area, and perhaps exchange messages with them. As a musician, I used it to communicate with other local bands and fans and to post gig listings. Simple.
One of many areas that needs improvement.
(Credit: MySpace)I don't understand how MySpace Music, which lets you watch videos and play songs from bands of all sizes and popularity levels, ties back to this initial vision. Why should I go to MySpace to hear this stuff? How does it tie back with my friends? How does it tie back with local and famous artists I'm following?
Solution: Get rid of MySpace Music as a separate site. Let any artist with a musician's page make their music available to all users in exactly the same way--users run a search, visit the musician's site, and add any content on that site to a playlist that they can post on their own site. Any user can ask any musician to become his friend. And so on. Forget the distinction--it's all music. Which gets me to my next point...
If you're going to offer free music, do it right. As I wrote Thursday, a couple years ago, free online streaming music was hard to find; now, it's commonplace. So let's try using MySpace Music to add some Led Zeppelin songs to my profile page. Nope--the first result is a promotional page for the band's 18-month-old "Mothership" compilation, and the rest of the results are various cover bands.
OK, what about Pink Floyd's "One of These Days"? Once I scroll past the sponsored listings that take up most of the page, the first result is a MySpace home page for a Pink Floyd cover band. Eventually there are some listings that appear to be the song I wanted, but by this time I've pretty much given up and decided that I'll be using Grooveshark or Imeem or any of the other countless competitors that give me the song I want, on demand, right away.
Solution: figure out how your competitors got those deals with the majors, and sign the same deals.
Fix your advertising. Online advertising pays for all the free content (including this blog--hooray!) that we're accustomed to getting, so I'm all in favor of reasonable and relevant ads. But MySpace has littered its most important pages with intrusive and annoying advertisements. My personal home page has two big graphical advertisements for Bank of America, plus graphical plugs for a game by Zynga, a MySpace Karaoke site, and sponsored listings for a concrete company. Admittedly, there hasn't been much action on my page for MySpace to use to target ads, but even when I visit other musicians' profile pages--the main reason I use the site--I'm bombarded by graphical banner ads for low-value products I have no interest in, like mortgage refinancing and online education classes. When I search for a particular song on MySpace Music and the top two-thirds of the page--nearly everything above the fold--is devoted to sponsored links and annoying video ads.
Contrast that with Facebook, where the ads on the most popular pages (home and profile pages) are limited to a clearly labeled right-hand column and are sometimes surprisingly relevant. One relative, a big Jerry Seinfeld fan, didn't know he was coming to her town until she saw an ad on her Facebook page. She actually bought a ticket through the site! I'm willing to bet that hardly ever happens on MySpace.
Solution: devote less space to advertising, eliminate the super-annoying blinking flashing banner ads, and do a better job of optimizing advertisements to individual users.
Fix search. It's better than it used to be, but it's still not very tolerant--unless you enter the exact band name, you might get a lot of irrelevant results. When I look for one of my favorite new Seattle bands, The Curious Mystery, I have to enter the "The" or it won't find them. If I search for one of the bands I used to play with, Half Light, I must enter it exactly: I can't enter "Half Light Seattle" even though that's the exact spelling of their unique MySpace URL (there was another Half Light when we tried to get that space).
Solution: wasn't that Google deal supposed to be about more than advertising? Maybe your next one can include some technology transfer as well.
Let the geeks run the company. One of the most interesting things going on at MySpace right now is the development platform: I'm seeing more digital start-ups who are essentially using MySpace like the Windows of online music, tapping into the functionality and social networking connections that have already been established there, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. This shows promise: build the ecosystem of apps, and users will have to keep coming back.
Solution: I don't know how MySpace is organized today, so I can't get too detailed here, but put the people with technical chops in charge, and don't let the marketers, ad salespeople, and record-industry business development folks run the show.
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I've had a chance to play around with Zune 2.5, the latest software update to Microsoft's iPod-competitor, and I'm happy to report that all of the basic fixes Microsoft promised, such as the ability to edit song information and sort songs by genre, are there and work as promised. They also fixed a number of other niggling problems--for example, you can now update album art by copying a file (say, an album cover you find on the Web) and pasting it immediately into the Zune software in the appropriate spot; previously, you had to save the file in the file system and then navigate to that spot from the Zune software. (Just typing that wore me out.) They also got rid of the weird "list" and "browse" views--they don't need "list" view anymore because you can edit song information from within browse view, which is the only view, and isn't called anything anymore--it's just the interface. Phew.
From within the Zune software, I can play a 30-second sample of Joy Division's "Let the Movie Begin" from my friend ILUVSPOKANE's playlist.
(Credit: Screenshot)With those fixes, the Zune software is no longer a show-stopper, and I can recommend the Zune as a credible alternative to the iPod. I still like the wireless sync, although other reviewers seem underwhelmed by it, and some of the new social features seem pretty cool--you can now see your friends from within the Zune software, play 30-second samples from their playlists and buy the songs with one click if you're interested, and add new friends by entering Zune tags or e-mail addresses. (Of course, recipients will have to have the Zune software and will have to register and sign in to "Join the Social.")
There are still a few issues--the software is a resource-hog, slowing down other apps on my 2006 Dell XPS Gen 2 laptop. (Task Manager in Windows XP shows it taking up more than 85MB of memory--and I've got the window minimized as I'm typing this blog entry in Firefox!) And I got a couple of error messages when trying to play songs on my friends' song lists, although that appears to have been worked out.
I can't really comment on the TV programming because (a) I don't watch TV regularly except for NFL football, (b) I can't imagine a situation where I'd want to watch a TV show on a Zune or iPod or any other portable small-screen device and (c) this blog's about music, innit? But apparently the Zune Marketplace has some shows from NBC, which pulled their shows from iTunes a while back, so a good checkbox feature for those of you keeping track.
Overall, though, a much-needed update that I think will make Zune more competitive than it's ever been, and I see a lot of promise if they keep updating the social and wireless features. Now if they can just figure out how to bolt a touch screen onto the device....
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