|
|
|
|
Why Last.FM is better than Myspace
Viewed 2731 times. 12 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
People who enjoyed reading this: filarion, tonearm, ST8, bsr, bbwax, race4prize, SenorFrio, everamzah, Otterfan, Roshi, craque, chri5
-->
In the evolution of the Web 2.0 world tons of sites grow out of nowhere as social networking communities. An early darling of this revolution was mySpace. Marked as the heaven of promotions and marketing, mySpace is a first stop for many musical artists. But now with the growing content and user saturation of Last.FM, sites like mySpace are poised to become the second class citizens of artist promotions.
Comparatively both mySpace and Last.FM provide a unique environment for artists and users to communicate with the community. Both were grown around the many to many experience forum format, and easily scale down to a one to one dialogue. These sites provide anyone with access to the environment the ability to discover their favorite artists, as well as their own musical peers. But which one REALLY enhances value?
mySpace is the place where artists and fans can gather as many friends as possible. A place where they can rally and push for that superstar status appearing as the hit destination, collecting "friends" into the thousands. A badge of success not without its distraction; the majority of these numbers are based on an artificial value. Artists and bands with many friends do not necessarily translate into having many listeners or devoted fans.
Case in point, NIN... the new album Year Zero has been generating quite a stir to listeners and fans of Trent Reznors' music. While on mySpace the information is shared and exposed, it's mostly at the drive of the admin of the NIN page. Meanwhile on Last.FM,... as fans of the artist discover more of the album, whole new threads generatively appear, sharing the information directly between fans... and the evolution of content happens WITHOUT direct interaction from the band, or the NIN account owner. In-fact all the content on Last.FM regarding NIN was user created, although it might have been seeded by the artist, and is open for change as the listeners and fans see fit.
The environment of mySpace limits the set of options fans have regarding how they can access and share content on an artist... Last.FM furthers the options by allowing user generated content to have reference to the artist. additional user content, or other artists as the user base see fit.
Statistically, while mySpace artists can have thousands of "friends", Last.FM is populated with actual accounting information on listening habits... which is the true test of which artists are REALLY popular. Comparing some of the top artists in both environments shows some clear indications on who has real value.
While mySpace has all the control that labels like in creating and branding artists... A site like Last.FM shows the power of the community and builds in the "truthiness" of the artists' value. Friend ratings don't actually represent the value of the artist in comparison to how many people really are supporters / fans / listeners. That single function was something mySpace never planned for in their all glitz page creation and artist promotion. Regardless of promotional branding and "friend" value shaping, listeners only have one set of ears....
(Originally posted on Lx7.ca) | |
Comments
03/01/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
mlbot
oh farts. There's a new last.fm software update, and I can't install that on my work computer. No use the old one to listen to last.fm.
03/01/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
Roshi
Otterfan said: "Until you have 10000 tracks scrobbled you will officially be known as n00b.
N00b."
Well, at least it's better than P00b.
03/02/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
vveerrgg
btw... my last ID: link.
I never thought about that with the whole shorter song thing.... i have no doubt that they'll figure that stuff out.. and prob did it to fight spam.
Register / login
|
^
EM411 is Copyright 2001-2008 EM411.com
All rights reserved. | Contact | RSS
|
