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Shawn Fanning Wants to Be Your Friend!
Social networking and Web-stalking tool MySpace recently announced that it will soon enable bands to sell tracks on the site, using the same interface that automatically cues up that terrible My Chemical Romance song whenever you’re looking up your ex-girlfriends.
The service will use Snocap, the distributed digital music marketplace co-founded by Shawn Fanning, who prompted the music biz to change its threat level to “brown” when he created Napster in 1999. Now clean, sober and legal, Snocap facilitates legitimate distribution via MP3 or Microsoft’s DRM-protected Windows Media format, but MySpace reportedly will only support unprotected MP3s. (Copy-lefters rejoice!)
This is more good news for unsigned bands, who have yet another way to reach audiences and make money without a record label. Although it has its problems, which I’ll detail below, MySpace has become a destination not only for fans, but for A&R folks and music supervisors and anyone else with an interest in discovering the next big thing. (The Arctic Monkeys and Klaxons, among others, owe much of their early and quick success to MySpace hype.)
The bad news is that to sell their tracks on MySpace, artists will have to register their works with Snocap, which is free for the first year but $30/yr thereafter. Not a big price to pay, but still a price — my third-grade math says you’d have to sell a few dozen tracks, perhaps more, to make back your investment every year. Which matters if what you’re selling is extremely obscure, or not very good.
Also, MySpace is getting a bit crowded. Now that everyone knows it’s the place to be if you’re an unsigned band, quality is going down. This is partially due to the economics of social networking — you discover new bands by trolling the “friends” of bands you like, and the quality of what you get depends on the editing skills of the band in question. Many bands (and their management) spend hours just spamming people for MySpace links. So if you’re like me, who doesn’t accept friend requests from artists he doesn’t care for (no offense), or who are obviously just trolling for more friends, you can still find good stuff based on those recommendations. On the other hand, artists have an incentive to accept every friend request they get, which means zero quality control.
But what about you? Are you in a band? Are you on MySpace? What are you getting out of it? Would you sell your tracks there, if you could? Let me know in comments.
Comments
Yeah, there are certainly reasons to be suspicious, but from a business perspective I'm not sure the revenue from all those indie bands is even on Rupert's radar. Given the deal they just did with Google it sounds like they're into cashing in on the sheer number of page views and that's it.
Spyware? I haven't seen anything so far, although I've got my defenses up. Can you give me some examples? That would be something I'd want to dig into.
Have you done a before and after test with a clean machine?Also,have you seen i-sound?you can get like a 100 song player,sell tunes,tones,show vids, so that's just an example.I just think it's time to get less hooked on here instead of more hooked and actually think in general it's a bad site to want to send all your fans to buy music
MySpace? What is that? Some kind of world wide web thing? Just kidding. I'm addicted.
well my point is try to get un-addicted
and find a better drug,don't get more addicted by thinking buying and selling tunes there is gonna keep you'high'.use it as 'gateway drug' to better things.as an artist,I think even YouTube is better.we have videos there and several links where music is available.myspace is weak for linking.so cool sites come and go.maybe the Stranger should get into the download business since a lot of people look to seattle for cool bands.
I think Myspace is just fine, such as it is, for finding new bands, sometimes finding potential listeners, etc. I haven't done a real tally, but I would guess 50-75% of my "friends" are bands, so it's more the former than the latter. That said, I am picky about who I'll accept. If a band is not up my alley, or has 10 billion friends and it's pretty obvious they just added me as part of a random campaign, then I deny them.
I'm not sure if I'll sign up with this selling thing. 30 bucks a year is pretty steep, and I honestly doubt I'd make it back via myspace sales (whether that's due to obscurity or just being "not very good," I couldn't say), especially when I already have links on my page to buy my songs via itunes, napster, rhapsody, emusic, etc. (Now I'm wondering if they'll start blocking those links, though.) In general, though, I would say that there being more ways for artists to get their music out there - and to be compensated for it - is a good thing.
ok,so the word is MySpace is just great
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It's hard for me to believe that there isn't something up the big R's sleeve here.There are so many options coming up, for people that think they have a good chance of selling downloads this
might not be much better than any other
site.Also,ever checked your computer right after you go to MySpace?I have and you get tons of adware/spyware every time you go there.Friends don't send friends to MySpace...