Who has the most fans on Facebook? A dead pop star, the president and Vin Diesel.
While quantity does not equal quality, it's instructive to note that when it comes to mass market social networking, music – with a few exceptions – is loosing the Facebook race.
What’s wrong with being loose? I presume you mean “losing”
this is meaningless, you can’t make any conclusions from this
Freeze Pops are more popular than Ashton Kutcher. Therefore, the conclusion we must draw from this is that Actors are losing the Facebook Fan Race to frozen sugar water. Sorry, I meant “loosing”.
My apologies for the 6AM spelling mistake. It’s corrected now. My point with the post that is the music industry wants to play the mass consumer game – as the major labels and some others do – there efforts at Facebook are being out shined by a bottle of Coke.
Part of the issue is Facebook itself: if I go to a Myspace page, I can stream music with one click, whereas Facebook seems to require both artist and fan to ‘add’ a third-party music player. The annoyance (and potential privacy issues) of adding another app to your page is a small but significant hindrance to actually listening (isn’t Make It Easy one of our mantras?). I’m not sure why they’ve made built-in functionality for sharing pictures, video, news/blog links, etc., but not for music (maybe fears of unauthorized use and getting raped by the RIAA?). In the end, I felt the best option was to include links to other sites where potential fans could more easily stream my music.
Music is best disseminated through sampling and sharing, and Facebook Fan pages aren’t very effective at that. But there’s plenty of music appreciation and recommendation happening through Facebook. For instance, consider the FB application called Music — a manifestation of http://www.iLike.com. It (and possibly other apps as well) enables FB members to share/recommend music with friends; provides sample clips and links to free MP3s; automatically sends notices when favorited artists release albums or schedule gigs in the user’s area, etc. I’d wager fan pages for books and authors aren’t comparatively un popular, but my personal experience tells me tons of book lovers use the Visual Bookshelf app to review and recommend books to each other. The point of Facebook (and all social media) is to share, commiserate with, and learn from real people you trust. It’s a mistake, IMHO, to interpret low enthusiasm for “official” marketing vehicles like Facebook pages as evidence that a particular artist/author/creative work isn’t well-represented in a social space. Understanding how well it’s represented takes much more careful research. FWIW, I’ve been a user and fan of iLike since its earliest days, but I have no other stake in it.
“there efforts at Facebook are being out shined by a bottle of Coke.” Which outspends all of the music majors on ads, and has global market penetration, and only a single product to build brand awareness of. Are you really surprised?
I heard that Facebook was dropping its favored support for iLike and working on a deal with Spotify. That could be huge considering that facebook continues to retain and add market share with relevant, timely features. Streaming Cloud library services like Spotify are the future. Daniel http://wizkidsound.com
Most of the Facebook fan pages, music and otherwise, just aren’t very compelling. People might become a fan of one thing or another to signal their interest, but there usually no reason to go back to the page.
I agree with Zak above: this is perfectly meaningless–or maybe even worse than meaningless as it purports to have meaning. The only meaning I can derive out of this is to note the type of meaningless commentary otherwise intelligent folks are driven to make when there is blog space to fill up 24 hours a day. Bruce should have stopped with the spot-on observation that quantity does not equal quality and left the rest of this way alone.
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What’s wrong with being loose? I presume you mean “losing”
this is meaningless, you can’t make any conclusions from this
Freeze Pops are more popular than Ashton Kutcher. Therefore, the conclusion we must draw from this is that Actors are losing the Facebook Fan Race to frozen sugar water.
Sorry, I meant “loosing”.
My apologies for the 6AM spelling mistake. It’s corrected now.
My point with the post that is the music industry wants to play the mass consumer game – as the major labels and some others do – there efforts at Facebook are being out shined by a bottle of Coke.
Part of the issue is Facebook itself: if I go to a Myspace page, I can stream music with one click, whereas Facebook seems to require both artist and fan to ‘add’ a third-party music player. The annoyance (and potential privacy issues) of adding another app to your page is a small but significant hindrance to actually listening (isn’t Make It Easy one of our mantras?). I’m not sure why they’ve made built-in functionality for sharing pictures, video, news/blog links, etc., but not for music (maybe fears of unauthorized use and getting raped by the RIAA?). In the end, I felt the best option was to include links to other sites where potential fans could more easily stream my music.
Music is best disseminated through sampling and sharing, and Facebook Fan pages aren’t very effective at that. But there’s plenty of music appreciation and recommendation happening through Facebook.
For instance, consider the FB application called Music — a manifestation of http://www.iLike.com. It (and possibly other apps as well) enables FB members to share/recommend music with friends; provides sample clips and links to free MP3s; automatically sends notices when favorited artists release albums or schedule gigs in the user’s area, etc.
I’d wager fan pages for books and authors aren’t comparatively un popular, but my personal experience tells me tons of book lovers use the Visual Bookshelf app to review and recommend books to each other. The point of Facebook (and all social media) is to share, commiserate with, and learn from real people you trust. It’s a mistake, IMHO, to interpret low enthusiasm for “official” marketing vehicles like Facebook pages as evidence that a particular artist/author/creative work isn’t well-represented in a social space. Understanding how well it’s represented takes much more careful research.
FWIW, I’ve been a user and fan of iLike since its earliest days, but I have no other stake in it.
“there efforts at Facebook are being out shined by a bottle of Coke.”
Which outspends all of the music majors on ads, and has global market penetration, and only a single product to build brand awareness of. Are you really surprised?
I heard that Facebook was dropping its favored support for iLike and working on a deal with Spotify. That could be huge considering that facebook continues to retain and add market share with relevant, timely features. Streaming Cloud library services like Spotify are the future.
Daniel
http://wizkidsound.com
Most of the Facebook fan pages, music and otherwise, just aren’t very compelling. People might become a fan of one thing or another to signal their interest, but there usually no reason to go back to the page.
I agree with Zak above: this is perfectly meaningless–or maybe even worse than meaningless as it purports to have meaning. The only meaning I can derive out of this is to note the type of meaningless commentary otherwise intelligent folks are driven to make when there is blog space to fill up 24 hours a day.
Bruce should have stopped with the spot-on observation that quantity does not equal quality and left the rest of this way alone.