I don't know how many of my readers are Springsteen fans, but the E Street Band's Danny Federici passed away late last week. There's a truly touching video on the Boss' website, containing what looks like his last performance with the group, from 3/20/08. Awesome stuff; the bond between Springsteen and Federici is amazing. This is a real loss; he was a great musician, and a real influence on my growth.
Here's a 10-minute journal-style entry of how I've shopped for music, roughly every six years, since I started buying albums, in relation to the social graph and different media. Here's how the media breaks down:
1984: I ask my mom if she can purchase me cassette tapes at the local Cal-dor that I have read about in magazines like Hit Parader.
1990: My cool 30-year-old cousin Rich clues me into cool bands, and I read Tower Records' Pulse magazine to learn about new ones. Nearly all of my shopping takes place at the local Tower Records.
1996: I read about bands in CMJ Magazine and hear about them from friends in my dorm. I buy the CDs and records at local record stores like the Exclusive Company in Madison, Wisconsin. Sometimes, I'll go on SPIN Magazine's nascent web site to check out bands.
2002: I check out bands on sites like mp3.com and in magazines like Rolling Stone and purchase CDs and records at my local Chicagoland record stores. I make my first iTunes purchase this year, noting that other users are making iMixes (playlists).
2008: I go to music stores and write down interesting album titles on my iPhone. I discuss them with friends on email, chat and Facebook. I stream the albums from Rhapsody, and pay $13/month for the service. I have not paid money for any CDs or discrete downloads in 2008, so far.
Facebook's Pages feature, which debuted only five weeks ago, is beginning to gain significant traction on MySpace's four-year-old music platform, with some interesting results.
Based on a sample of MySpace artist Top Tens in three categories (Unsigned, Indie and Major-Label),major-label bands that have engaged fans in Facebook are seeing the greatest success in building a Facebook fan base, followed by independent label bands and unsigned bands.
For example, even though Alicia Keys and Nine Inch Nails (currently an unsigned artist) have similar-sized MySpace fan bases (Keys' 400k to Nails' 528K), Nine Inch Nails are only able to cultivate a fan base half the size of Keys' on Facebook, proportionately speaking. Tila Tequila, another MySpace phenomenon (#1 in the Unsigned category with 2.4M fans) is also only about half as able, proportionately, as #1 MySpace major-label artist Chris Brown to build out a Facebook fan base.
The trend is fairly clear across the categories: mainstream, major-label artists are, proportionately, 2.75 times more able to draw fans on Facebook, proportionate to their MySpace fan bases.
50% of the current MySpace Top Ten artists in each category now have a Facebook Artist Page. A few artists, like Hawthorne Heights, invented pages posing as people on Facebook, to get their bands on Facebook before the Facebook Pages feature debuted last month. I was unable to assess those numbers because Facebook won't reveal them unless you're the artist's "friend". Even if I were to use those stats, the fan metric would have been unequal to how the other artists were measured.
I was initially interested in investigating Facebook's traction in the music space because my new band, Reds, lacks a MySpace page. Even back in 2003, when I first joined MySpace, I was very ambivalent about the platform, mainly because I wasn't wild about the look of the musician web pages - the bric-a-brac HTML was a little much for me. I can't see a huge advantage, personally, to creating a MySpace page currently, but my 21-year-old drummer disagrees with me. Probably because a lot of his buddies are still using MySpace.
If my own Myspace Vs. Facebook musical orientation is in question, I wrote this post listening to Styx, Rush and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis on Pandora.
[One note about methodology, I had to estimate MySpace fan amounts for Kanye West and Yo Gotti (which I pencilled in at 1M and 100K, respectively) because they did not post this number on their MySpace pages. I estimated this based on the comment/fans ratio that held constant for similar Top Ten artists (same genre, same silo).]
Recent Comments