Co-Founder Of #1 Music App RootMusic Says Facebook Must To Do More For Musicians
BandPage is is the #1 music app on Facebook with 21 million active users; and that's quite an accomplishment since it was created for bands rather than the masses fo fans. But in addition to artists friendly features like the ability to offer free music in exchange for a Facebook like or email address, the main reason behind RootMusic's success is Facebook itself.
From the very start, Facebook has ignored music. “When’s the last time you tried to do something with Facebook, and they listened to you?” RootMusic co-founder J Sider asked the Rethink Music conference audience in Boston. “We need a concise platform around music that’s here to work with you.”
Particularly with the demise of MySpace, Facebook has an opportunity that it seems unwilling to exploit.
Rootmusic has definitely blown up. I created a pretty cool app for musicians to lock their content http://apps.digijeff.com/ called Freeload.
learn some history – facebook never ignored music. their goal from the outset was to NOT copy myspace, and they chose to not develop a music platform, SPECIFICALLY to allow for others to do it, and do it better. if facebook hadn’t “ignored” music as J states above, HE’D BE WITHOUT A JOB.
and being “concise” as he puts it, seems to mean simply copying myspace’s old music layout, and laying it over facebook so that every single band’s page looks like same?
oh. goodie.
Hey Bruce,
Just wanted to clarify a bit here, what I was saying is that Facebook is a great platform to build on and as you’ve said we have had a lot of success with it. We have a great relationship with them and appreciate it very much. But if you are an individual artist or manager it’s tough to simply call up FB and ask if they could make a change on the platform for you. So a lot of times we get calls and can help with that and making BandPage better. So as BandPage is the largest music app and continues to grow we want to hear from you and improve on it. If you have specific features or need something changed on BandPage then we can be the ones that can help with that.
Facebook does an amazing job at providing a great platform and it is our job at RootMusic to improve and make the most out of it for musicians. We are simply here to help and that’s what we work hard to do, always.
Cheers,
J Sider
Hypebot hater, I know the history and reject the idea that Facebook had to descend into MySpace hell to include music in its platform in ways that its users would enjoy.
J – You are doing what you can for bands – but Facebook should do what they can to bring music to their mass of users.
Facebook moves very methodically, and in it’s own time. Facebook is in a great position to give a good run in the digital music space download space because of the number of users and the demographic data they have on all of us – the like button tells them so.
My belief is that more artists/companies should focus on an ad/marketing strategy that draws fans/customers back to their website to build their own connection/email relationship with their fans. Artist/brand leveraging social and capitalizing their site.
Artists need Social sites only to leverage the users who share the content with their friends (the connection and viral piece) the social piece should always be a draw back to create actions to either like, share, buy, or head over to the artist site.
There is a price to pay for driving direct traffic to third party sites, no matter how ad agancies would like to justify the reach these social sites have. A price that twitter, facebook, and in the past past myspace – almost every company in the world adds social icons and links even to nation TV commercials, billboards, print ads, most offline advertisements giving these social platforms over a billion dollars of free advertising. It’s crazy – but somehow some inexperience social guru (many) person in digital got agencies and corporate convinced or hypnotised.
Two messages:
Send your customer to your website – if the customer is social let them share the content from your site with their friends and connect with your brand in social if they are social.
Give unique content on your website, to draw the social user back into your world, unless it’s a share or a like — your users should not be going the other way.
As for RootMusic – kudos — the company provide a great products and services for artists. The FB app. for artists is very user friendly, easy to use, and affordable. I wouldn’t worry too much about who is going to replace MySpace or wish upon a star hoping FB would be everything to everyone with a nice little bow. All of my above views hold true —just leverage social.
Rob
Rob,I agree with you on the ads…and to do that,the artists need to focus a little more of their beer change on the advertising end of things…..by putting revenue back into yourself,you’ll get allot more to and from your pages etc(and website)……..the problem is the crap tastic poo fest of”its free you can do it this way”you get fed 2 million times a day,have people thinking they dont need to invest in themselves….rise above,and put money into yourself,doesnt have to be allot…..
Facebook is a social networking site with advanced capabilities. This includes all markets and industries and this is why FB works so well. I agree with the guys speaking on driving traffic back to websites. Let FB remain ambiguous. It provides for more opportunities.
rob – you’re thinking about two years behind man. the goal is to get product in the fans hand’s whereever they are. period. facebook accounts more hours per day than any other online activity – why shouldn’t you be selling to them there – WHERE THEY ARE, and have them post about it to their friends?
and “if they are social”? really? 500 Million active users. Five Hundred Million Globally. 30% within the US – that’s 150 Million. THAT’S HALF THE POPULATION OF THE US.
chances are – the half of the population that isn’t on facebook is either comprised of children, or only buys music at walmart (if they even do).
if you want the fans to “come to the artists world” you’d better start talking to them in theirs – That’s whats going to draw them in. and if you can keep them interested where they already are – making the process easier for the fans – should that be the REAL goal?
It is a known fact that F*c*book’s customers are not little independent bands or independent labels but big corporations who don’t just generate profiles but also spend on advertising there for their product promotion. Wasn’t it on here where I read that they do get customer support whereas artists only get annoyed when their account gets deleted because they entered their stage names instead of their real names?
As a fan who is not on F*c*book, I really wonder what’s the benefit of a network that sucks you in with the promise of I don’t know how many millions of users you can promote your indie product to, but locks out all other internet users and search engines from your promotional content you put on there for free and which you want everybody to see and hear.
Hypebot hater – you’re serious? lol Mr. Hater I don’t have shoes 2 years old let alone ideas. I have been in the internet space since 95, seen companies come, go, get beat, get purchased, and have personally experience first hand all of the above. It would be naive for you to think that my intention or advice is to not leverage social – it’s how you go about it…social is the majority of my marketing business. Either my mistake for not being clear in my thought/writing, or you misunderstood.
My point(s) really are that there is no one social piece or site that you should focus your efforts on. If you (Hypebot hater) say Twitter and FB and start running with stats again…come on man. Everyone on this forum get’s it. An artist or brand still needs a combination of online/offline marketing and adverting strategies – as Alex pointed out above.
Another point I was trying to get across was that “unless you or your agency are doing a specific social campaign” instead of adding Twitter and FB icons to all of your assets – focus on driving your customer to your site – customer acquisition cost is very expensive…so you think that it’s better to pay even 1 dollar to drive traffic to a social site for a like, then to engage the customer on your site?
This mind set for brands and celebrities is several years old, and we have seen it go from adding MySpace logos to Twitter and FB on all of an artist and brands ad assets. This why FB is worth a trillion dollars. It’s brilliant on their part. Free endorsements and shout outs, and some of the largest ad campaigns from TV, Radio personalities, celebrities, and the largest brands in the world. Brilliant. This is a great business model. lol Problem: no one today mentions myspace or friendster in a conversation, icon and links taken down, no more shout outs all in less then a year. Bye bye.
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Where is the “free music in exchange for a like ” function ??? I have a BandPage account and have never seen this option anywhere !
Hypebot,
You need to use a bit of caution when using the facebook MAU’s (monthly active users) metric in terms of naming an app the #1 music app.
In the case of RootMusic and other ‘fan page’ apps, the MAU’s represent the # of fans that have interacted with the app in the last month, NOT the number of installs of the app, etc.
So, for a company like Root, who focuses on getting major acts to use their app, the MAU # is simply a measure of the aggregate popularity of the artists who have placed the app on their page.
for example, if Drake uses the app and makes it the default tab on his page, every fan who comes to his fan page and plays a song (via soundcloud, mind you) is considered an MAU for Root.
Root has focused on landing major acts like the Drake’s of the world, and it only takes a few of those to add up to significant MAUs, due to THEIR popularity. But those fans have not installed the app, and are not ‘using it’, but merely interacting with it as a way of interacting with the Artist’s fan page. In that way, the MAU’s of this app and others like it are misleading to some extent.
It would not be fair to compare this app’s MAUs to something like iLike because iLike actually has fans installing it and interacting with it themselves.
Just thought this needed some clarity, as its more a statement about the number of major artists that Root has landed than the amount of fans that are ‘using’ their music app. Not trying to take away from their accomplishment. Its really great that they have been able to work with all the major labels and get many of those artists to use their app. But I think the headline might be a bit misleading to an average reader who thinks that this app is being ‘used’ my millions of music fans.