The last thing the world needs at this point might possibly be another entrant into the digital-music business (Merge excluded, obvs), but everyone’s second-favorite social networking site is exploring the idea of how they too can cannibalize the remaining bits of corpse that once belonged to the major labels. While I’d be happy to support any project that keeps me from ever having to visit a band’s MySpace page again, how many paradigms are we going to go through on how to sell music before we settle on one?
The approach has come in the past week and was described as “preliminary”. It follows similar moves by MySpace, the leading social network site, which is discussing a MySpace Music joint venture with the four largest record companies - Universal Music, Sony BMG, Warner Music and EMI.
The record companies, all of whom declined to comment, view the recent talks as evidence of the importance of music to social networking sites as they vie for young audiences.
They are hoping that the sites, which have mostly served as promotional platforms for artists, will become sources of revenue at a time when their sales of physical albums are in decline. They are also eager to encourage a counterweight to Apple’s dominant iTunes store.
Facebook, which declined to comment, has been working in recent months to bolster its music offerings.
In November, it introduced a way for bands to create their own home pages similar to those found on MySpace. It also has links to iTunes and offers applications from several internet music companies, including iLike, Last.FM and Pandora.
So, what’s the brilliant idea that Facebook has? Free, advertising-supported streams–and paid downloads. I can barely contain my excitement either. You get the feeling that companies like Facebook have figured they’ve milked all they can from their current business model and are salivating greedily over what they see as a new revenue stream, but they lack any particular reason for iTunes’ or Amazon’s current customer base to really switch allegiances. The record labels see the massive number of hits these sites receive and see a customer base that has largely left them behind. It seems like a win/win situation on the corporate level, but what will the consumer get? More of the same? It certainly seems like it.
Facebook asks labels about music service [Financial Times]
What continues to fascinate me is how the labels seem to think that “If we can only make our crappy tunes more easily accessible to today’s youth by bombarding them with T-Pain ringtones at the websites they visit most often, they’ll never even know they’re being marketed to!”
The reason for the decline of the industry is the industry itself. Overpaid lazy blowhards
(whose only real association to musicians is their sharing of the same coke dealer) really have no place in this new digital world.
“Facebook SuperPokes Its Nose Into Selling Music. Sell out, download, or stream with Facebook! … OR SuperPoke back!”
What they need to do is create an itunes app that allows you to get music directly from itunes within facebook.
This would be interesting if it allowed indie artists to get their music onto the iTunes music store easily. Currently it is kind of a pain to get your music sold there. Although this would probably significantly ruin the signal to noise ratio.
What’s hard? You pay your fee to CDBaby. They get your crappy music up on itunes alongside all of the other crappy music. CDBaby makes their money and… and… your music resides on the digital shelves along with 99.99 percent of the rest of the digital music that never sells. Getting your music “available” isn’t hard if you have money. Getting anyone to care is another story.
I’m wary of anything Facebook + music-related, since the other day when I tried to upload music onto my new Fan page and a page appeared demanding I send them a .jpg of my ID (driver’s licence, student ID or passport). Um, no thanks.
@ThreeBirds: Yeah, I had to send at least 2 different shots of different IDs, plus 10 or 15 different messages, to, like, 4 different people, just so I could upload a bunch of tracks from my label that no one’s ever going to bother listening to on Facebook anyway. Music 2.0: whee, fun.
@leevilgenius: @rockstarjoe: It’s actually even easier than that… If you only want digital distribution, go to Tunecore, and get your music up on a bunch of different stores at the same time. It’s dirt cheap, and super easy.
The 2000s will be the decade of the inspired amateur with a home computer and an internet connection making immediate, imaginative music without a thought of pandering to market forces, to be consumed instantly and to be celebrated for it’s lack of pretensions towards being anything other than young, pretty, interesting and exciting. This age belongs to nobody and, in that, is the single greatest period in the history of popular music. Burn your musty old libraries and join the party.
There will be no more music industry.
“Careers” do not mean anything. They are a completely artificial result of the restrictions brought on by the limitations of the formats music has traditionally been distributed in. We think in terms of careers because they have been a functional way of approaching music up until recently. Whether a song is famous has nothing to do with whether it is good - and we all know that, but are surprisingly reluctant to apply that maxim when it comes to dealing with this peculiar, scattered, anarchic environment of small, unimportant, cult-level domains that the audience and artist demographics have broken into.
There will never be another truly famous artist in the same way there will never be another Julius Caesar or Charlemagne, simply because the dynamics of the world have changed.
I can see why one might miss that, might miss the grandeur, the legendary qualities, the stories - things which don’t look like they’ll happen ever again. Like nations, artists will be more functional, smaller in scope, less awe inspiring than before.
It’s a new and more egalitarian world and there is a lot to be found within it.
Like I said, there will be no more music industry.
And that will be the best thing to happen to the music.