sinéad's lifestream

Music Marketing on Social Networking Sites

Have you discovered one of your favourite music artists by chance on a social networking site? How do you feel about friend requests from bands you’ve never heard of? Can you recall a really outstanding marketing approach from a music artist on a social networking site? Lots of questions and one survey which is trying to find out the answer:  Fansights 2.0

Fansights 2.0 – The Survey

To introduce myself: My name is Kathrin and like Sinéad I am a master student at IADT and right now running a survey as part of my master thesis. My survey Fansights 2.0 is about music marketing on social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Bebo, Facebook) and the perception of these marketing techniques among music fans. I am still looking for music fans and music promoters who would be willing to take part in my survey. If you could take a few minutes to fill out the survey or pass it on to interested friends I would really appreciate it. You can also drop me a message under www.myspace.com/fansights and you will receive a copy of the results once they are published.

Thanks a mill to Sinéad for posting this and to everybody interested in my research project!

Not only are music fans beginning to prefer Wikipedia over Myspace for finding out information about musicians, other fans are using the Myspace forums and blogs to post links to their illegally uploaded mp3s. There are numerous threads within the music forums on Myspace that contain active and unbroken links to full album downloads.

This is rather interesting, especially considering that just recently Universal Music, Sony-BMG and Warner Music signed a deal with Myspace to create “Myspace Music” where fans can listen to free streaming music (of their choice, of course), whilst being bombarded with advertisements. All this, in an attempt to retrieve revenue lost, from… illegal mp3 file sharing.

I found these forums searching for information on the upcoming Breeders album, Mountain Battles, set for release on the 7th of April, only to find a leaked copy fully available to download.

The question is – was the temptation to download it too much? Or did I simply click the “report abuse” button and quickly move on.

What do you think?

Google has paid out $900 million to provide search results and ad listings on MySpace.com (read more…). Basically, this means that MySpace users will be able to use Google Search without having to leave www.myspace.com – entering any term into the search box directs myspace users to a page similar to this one, the Google ads appear in the form of sponsored listings in the search results. This will be of major benefit to Google as an additional source of traffic and ad revenue. Almost 100 million MySpace members will access Google’s search tool from the network, thus viewing ads relevant to their search terms.

Google will also provide contextually targeted placements on MySpace pages. Unlike the search box functionality, this has yet to be implemented. Considering Google’s policies on not administering pop-up advertisements (and the Google Toolbar that actually attempts to blocks pop-ups – emphasis on the attempt, as my own Google Toolbar still allows Dell ads from MySpace to appear) this suggests an end to pop-ups on MySpace.

Personally, I’m hoping it is also an end to “interesting” animated banner and skyscraper ads for online dating websites – for example this monstrosity. Also, ads that are misleading and direct the user to install rogue anti-spyware/adware/malware products. Currently, these ads still exisit on MySpace. Just recently Google has started warning people when search results could potentially lead them to malicious code, if these ads continue to appear on MySpace, perhaps these warning signs should be displayed when your search term is “myspace”.

MySpace.com currently sits at number 14 in the Alexa.com Top 500 most popular websites online. I predict that MySpace will begin falling in popularity after introducing pop-up advertisements that counteract pop-up blocking toolbars, and browsers.

I simply do not understand how a legitimate website can FORCE it’s distracting advertisements upon a user. Pop-ups are a nuisance to web surfers, intruding upon a users web surfing experience. A user that occasionally uses the Internet may not necessarily be annoyed by pop-ups, but the more a person uses the Internet, the more pop-ups they see and the more annoying and less effective as advertising tools these pop-ups become.

In the last 10 minutes of using MySpace I have had to close 5 different pop-ups, despite using Mozilla Firefox (which blocks the pop-ups automatically). So MySpace.com have taken away my right to CHOOSE if I want to see pop-up ads or not. This, is not an acceptable practice for a legitimate website. If the top 5 websites online (Yahoo!, MSN, Google, Yahoo! Japan and Baidu.com) do not contain pop-up advertisements, how can a website that’s in the Top 20 risk using pop-ups?

MySpace.com may gain some additional revenue by forcing pop-ups on its users – but in the long run, it will simply force users away from the site to competitors like MsnSpaces, Friendster etc,. It already suffers from long periods of downtime and a slow loading time, just because it is at the top today, does not mean it will remain there.