Music & Social Networks
As much as many of us may dislike social networking sites such as Myspace and Bebo, according to an article from the BBC, they can be very useful for finding new music.
Having music on one’s personal profile can be a great way of expressing your mood, interest or background and understandbly social networking sites are a fantastic way for discovering new bands. I run a CD Duplication company as well as running this blog and we find that a lot of our customers treat Myspace in particular as a very important tool in the promotion of their material.
However, the BBC also report that the number of illegal downloads made are on the increase: “The survey [by Olswang] found the number of people claiming that they illegally download music tracks has risen, from 36% in 2006 to 43% in 2007.” This is not at all surprising, considering the number of P2P services around these days.
A large proportion of music fans of all ages have tried downloading music illegally and a further percentage of them will continue to do so on a regular basis. It has been found useful amongst my peers in the past for perhaps checking out a new album before purchasing. I certainly have done so in the past, before purchasing the album digitally online. However, with the advent of sites such as 7digital, where you can listen to decent length samples of tracks, can people really still try to justify their illegal habits as “trying before they buy?”
Everton over at Connected Internet has also commented on the recent Olswang survey: “You’ll never guess what the number one reason for downloading was…91% of respondents surprisingly said “Because it’s free”, followed by 42% saying because file-sharing networks have more choice.”
File sharing is even causing havoc with many UK ISPs and many are moving to set download limits on their customers to stop their networks from becoming overloaded by users downloading files illegally. Others will shape and limit the traffic allowed at certain times of the day, to ensure that there is enough bandwidth available for all customers.
Moving back to social networking sites, I feel that the article from the BBC has missed out one of the key (and my most favourite) music sites on the Internet – last.fm. For those of you who don’t know about this site, last.fm allows you to share your musical tastes with other music fans from around the world. They have an extremely innovative radio player that allows you to type in an artist that you like and then it will create a radio station just for you with artists that are similar in style. I’ve lost count of the number of new bands and artists that I’ve found through this feature. Myspace is all well and good but the sheer amount of comment spam and fake profiles on there only serve to push “real” music fans away to more intelligent and creative sites.
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