If you've liked a bunch of musicians on Facebook, you may have realized that you rarely see the content from their pages in your feed. This is part of Facebook's grand strategy to force musicians to buy ads if they want to share their content, even with people who've requested to see it. Now the cofounders of Tracks.by have taken that Facebook FAIL and turned it into a whole new site called Hipset.
But Hipset doesn't just show you what you're missing on Facebook, it also provides a new marketing service for musicians that turns the tables on FB's command and control approach to social networking.
When I first checked in with cofounders Matt Schlicht and Mazy Kazerooni, they were focused on developing Tracks.by's Facebook app. This move took their extensive work in social media for musicians and began the process of turning that knowledge into web tools intended to be accessible to all musicians.
Since then they've not only opened up the Facebook app but have also joined the current crop being incubated at top of the heap tech incubator Y Combinator.
With Hipset they've created a simple solution to the fact that most of the content musicians post on their Facebook pages is not actually seen by the fans who've liked those pages. It's part of the magic of Facebook's godlike algorithm. You tell it what you want and occasionally you actually get that.
When I logged into Hipset via my Facebook account, I was presented with a page of content from musicians I'd Liked on FB arranged in the now ubiquitous grid pattern often associated with Pinterest (though it was actually quite widespread before that site's rise).
As I scrolled down the page I realized that I had not seen 20% of that content. No, I had seen 0% of that content. Given that I go to Facebook multiple times a day this is not a good look for FB as a music marketing vehicle.
Though a wide variety of sites allow you to login using Facebook and then use your likes to show you related content, this is the first site I've seen that could show me lots of content that was new to me by simply showing me what I asked to see on Facebook.
One can also see all artists listed, go to an individual artist's Hipset page or filter what one sees through tabs labeled Photos, Videos or Statuses. According to a comment by cofounder Matt Schlicht on Hacker News, there are other options on the site that will be more visible over time as well as new developments to come.
But the Hipset vision goes beyond such options to provide artists the ability to post first on Hipset and then distribute to other social sites including Facebook.
And since Facebook's Open Graph is a key element of Hipset, views there will help raise the visibility of artist content on FB, tweaking it's algorithm from afar. A nice example of turning the tables.
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch) maintains a business writing hub at Flux Research and blogs at Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
