iTunes Chart-Toppers (a/o February 21st):
August 3rd, 2011: Facebook releases the 'Musician's Guide,' a 40-page manual for creating a band presence on its network.
August 31st, 2011: RootMusic secures $16 million in second-round funding to further develop its Facebook-focused BandPages product suite.
September 1st, 2011: Roadrunner Records selects FanBridge
to manage Facebook pages for its artist portfolio.
September 22nd, 2011: Facebook's f8 takes place in San Francisco, a likely launching spot for 'Facebook Music'. That probably includes stepped-up integrations involving Spotify, as well as Rdio, MOG, and others (now or later).
_________________________
If MySpace Music is dead, then Facebook Music - broadly defined - is still just coming to life! And everyone has something to gain in this game.
Let's start with the DIY/DTF market. RootMusic is ostensibly the leader here, and a $16 million infusion is nothing to sneeze at. They've also been clocking some impressive Facebook app rankings. But everyone else is also banging on this door, including ReverbNation, Topspin, Bravado, and others.
Oh, and FanBridge, which just wrestled a plum client: Roadrunner Records. But FanBridge is already in this game, in a serious way: they're powering Lady Gaga's page, for example, one of the largest on Facebook (RootMusic has Rihanna's page, whose ranking is neck-and-neck).
The Roadrunner deal starts off with pages for Theory of a Deadman, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Young the Giant, and the Parlor Mob, according to details shared on Friday. That follows a successful campaign for Dream Theater back in April. "The team at FanBridge has provided us with a great set of tools to achieve our Facebook goals for our artists, and have also been extremely willing to develop and adapt according to our specific requirements and requests," Roadrunner senior vice president of Artist Relations Jon Satterley relayed.
But wait, there's so much more. Because the largest DIY platform in the world - ReverbNation - recently released a smart advertising platform called Promote It. This is based on an updated set of smart advertising tools released by Facebook, and the ReverbNation configuration allows artists to do all sorts of geo-targeting, deep tracking, fan-building, and song-specific outreach. And they're just the first ones out on this - expect lots of 'smart ad' Facebook releases ahead from rivals.
These are just a few examples of an extremely competitive space, using developments from the past few weeks. But there's also a monster competitor that you might be overlooking: Facebook itself. We keep seeing Facebook executives showing up at music conferences (most recently at Bandwidth in San Francisco), and lots of evidence suggesting a more hands-on role.
We'll take the old Facebook line of 'hey, we're a hands-off open platform' with a grain of salt. In early August, the company shared a great, 40-page guide for creating your own Facebook band page, for starters. And the bigger music gets, the more tempted Facebook will be to get seriously involved.
Which leads us to the consumer space, and one of the most anticipated meetings of September: f8. That's the Facebook developers confab, a place where everyone expects lots of news on 'Facebook Music,' if it actually gets that name. The easy answer is that we'll see Spotify get the choice integration, though more likely, consumers will have the choice. And, most of these stores are already available as apps, so the focus seems to be on re-packaging and improving their presence. Mashable says MOG, Rdio, and others will get the focus, and we've heard lots of different names tossed around.
All of which raises the most important question of all: will artists ultimately make any money off this? And if not, why not?
/paul.
Comments Closed
@BentSelf Sunday, September 04, 2011
Dustyn (BENT SELF)
True.
Maxwellian Sunday, September 04, 2011
Funny because I really thought $16 million for Root Music was a typo because there are just so many important problems with that model. Those guys should still have kept going on a smaller amount and really proven what they could do, I've seen this a million times where a company gets too much cash hoping to get fattened up for an acquisition or something - it either works or goes kapoof.
::MW
NathanJE Sunday, September 04, 2011
THANK YOU.
MySpace is f*ing toast and Specific (who bought it) needs to just milk as much as possible for two years then bolt. That's the ONLY play available here on that one, sorry Justin.
simpleman Sunday, September 04, 2011
So can artists finally stop updating their Myspace? Or better yet delete them?
Vail, CO Sunday, September 04, 2011
You're right and you're wrong Digital Music News.
Right: Myspace is in the toilet, it's done and the action's on Facebook. Facebook is where the heat is, the investment, the traffic, the bands, everything.
Wrong: Facebook is in trouble as we speak and it's only a matter of time before it spoils just like Myspace did. Just check your friend request it's all spam and scam operations, the Nigerians found out about this one and it's got a major spam problem. At least someone's home to try to figure it out but this is turning into chaos, plus all the privacy problems and controls.
Just seeing problems all over the place, including the hack-aggeddon thing. Oh, and I'm bumping into people who ditched Facebook like that. Just too much drama and issues.
Benji Rogers Sunday, September 04, 2011
Surely the issue is that what killed MySpace was that it was a poorly thought our social network that tried to become a hybrid music/social site. It ended up failing at both.
Facebook is an incredible social network which is about to get over run with spam adds from bands & labels & ultimetaly become unusable as a social network. An endless stream of music from spotify, or another hundred thousand stores/widgets/free tracks is surely not what is wanted in a social network in the first place is it?
As regards musicians making money or not - the problem is not more ways and places to sell or stream music. There are thousands of options out there. The probelm is getting people to care.
A stream full of "listen to my songs" & "buy my new shit" is not going to solve the probelm for bands, fans or the social network. It will if anything add to the noise.
It seems to me that Facebook is thriving because it did not go the way of MySpace.
I sense a billion more allerts, offers and adds and not much else.
Just what we needed.
More things to try and ignore.
lifer Sunday, September 04, 2011
Benji has it right. Once strangers can become friends and Farmville infiltrates your community and the virtual government (Facebook itself) has no crediblity when it comes to your privacy, then the beginning of the end has already begun.
The whole point of a social network is to have a virtual community that is roughly analagous to a real world community.
No one wants strangers crashing their private get together, no one wants sales people given unfettered access to their home and no one wants the government invading their privacy or making their IRS information vulnerable to prying eyes.
And no one wants a parade of every band in the world traipsing through their neighborhood while hawking wares in a cacaphonous bazaar of sound, fury and buh, buh, buh beats.
DontJump Sunday, September 04, 2011
Sorry guys, Facebook like everyone else has to make money, and therefore they'll continue to be selling out their users with ads slipped into their feeds, giving away personal data (*aggregated* of course), and making privacy controls arcane.
@eladnmusical Monday, September 05, 2011
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