Facebook Traffic Surpasses MySpace – Music Services Proposed

Within the past week, two very important stories have broken regarding Facebook that independent musicians and bands should be aware of. These two emerging trends should clearly point out the importance of having a Facebook presence in maintaining a social connection to you and for your music.

Brian Solis, big thinker, co-founder of the Social Media Club and author a great book called Now is Gone, was the first to report on the fact that, for the first time ever, traffic to Facebook surpassed MySpace this past December.

In his blog post from this past Tuesday, Mr. Solis reveals that the popularity of social network, Facebook, reached 2.18% of all Internet visits on this past Christmas Eve. While this could have been the season to wish you and yours a holly, jolly seasons greetings, it was also a more ominous sign for long time social front runner MySpace. While the traffic to MySpace is not yet even close to an exodus from their 76 million users, this chart on Compete shows that the trend is not certainly not making very positive gains over their accomplishments in 2007. It actually shows MySpace.com traffic down nearly 10%. Has MySpace run out of gas? How many new friends have you added in the past six months? What new innovations have you been excited about that have you drawn you or your friends back to MySpace?

This is the point when you say, “Yeah, but Facebook doesn’t get my music heard.” This morning’s post by TechCrunch’s Micheal Arrington, called How Warner Music Killed Facebook Music, is a must read. This post provides some very important behind-the-scenes details of the efforts that this highly popular social network in taking on in order to get music into the lives of their 55 million users. While there are already several Facebook music apps, obviously a solution provided by the network itself will gain much greater acceptance over plug-ins and strap-ons.  Or is that strap-on and plug in?

This morale of this short story, and the reason for highlighting these two new Facebook trends, is to remind independent musicians and bands of one VERY important element. Social Networks need people and keeping people happy these days is not an easy job – ask any retailer. Your task is to follow those people who are likely interested in you and your music. Capture your friends, fans and followers by getting email addresses and zip/postal codes. If you cannot reach out and touch your tribe with a simple email message, then you are relying on technology that is not as social or as beneficial as you might believe. If MySpace, Twitter OR Facebook closed down tomorrow, what tangible information do you have on your following?  This is an important question and one that will likely require action from you and your band mates.

-pjc

Music Purchases Surge to 1.5 Billion in 2008!

Yahoo! is reporting the 2008 Nielsen/SoundScan music sales numbers for the music industry.  In a world full of record unemployment, reduced consumption, crashing stock markets, housing market declines and war, is it really any surprise that the world is turning to music for comfort?  Yes, music purchases INCREASED 10.5% in 2008 versus 2007 according to this report.

The link above will provide the spreadsheet view of these statistics, but if you want the Top 5  points about this recording breaking music sales years, here they are in no particular order for your consumption:

1. Digital Albums OUTSOLD Physical Albums sold over the internet by over TWICE as much (65.8M vs 27.5M). The general trend is that the online sales of physical albums (CDs mostly) was down 8.6% over 2007, while Digital Albums sales reached a new record in 2008 and was up 32% over 2007.   Bottom line is, if you had your new CD and the same new album digitally on Amazon, the average here is stating that you were likely to sell more than TWICE as many digital vs. physical online.

2.  One bright spot in the physical sales stats here was good old VINYL. The report states the vinyl album sales nearly doubled from the 1m purchases during 2007 to 1.8M in 2008.  These are PURCHAES, not sales volumes.  Maybe that limited edition, signed and numbered idea has merit after all (and profit too). The top selling vinyl album in 2008 was Radiohead’s In Rainbows which sold 25,800 copies. A distant second was The Beatles Abbey Road with 16,000 copies.

3.  This report is focused on the 1.5 billion music purchases – not sales.  The vast majority of those purchases?  Digital Music Tracks equated for over 1,070,000,000 purchases during 2008, which set a new record and grew 27% over the 844M purchases in 2007. The top selling digital album for 2008 was Coldplay’s Viva La Vida which sold 617,000 times with Jack Johnson’s Sleep Through the Static a distant second with 325,000 digital album purchases.

4.  Nielsen uses three ways to categorize Albums based upon its age; Current, Catalog and Deep Catalog. We will not spend time here in this summary to get into all the details, but we mainly want to convey this; Of the three categories for DIGITAL albums, the one with the strongest growth during 2008 was Deep Catalog, up 41% over 2007.  Current Digital  Albums were up 27% and Catalog Digital Albums were up 37%.   I think this clearly conveys that its not just the new “current” music that is being purchased digitally. Digital albums grew to represent 15% of total album sales in 2008, after representing 10% in 2007 and just 5.5in 2006.

5. The Digital field gets wider:

• 2005: only two songs sold more than 1 million digital copies.
• 2006: 22 songs sold more than 1 million digital copies.
• 2007 : 41 songs sold more than 1 million digital copies.
• 2008: 71 songs sold more than 1 million digital copies.

With Apple’s recent decision to remove DRM copy-protection from iTunes tracks, it’s not hard to predict over 100 tracks will sell more than 1 million copies during 2009.  Will yours be one of them?

Finally, I find it odd that the Nielsen “factoids” section goes to lengths to mention that Metallica’s Death Magnet was the number one selling Internet Album (a physical disc being sold by an online store) with 144,000 units sold. But FAIL to mention that they sold more digital copies of the same album (158,000) but Metallica was at the bottom of that top 10 digital album chart.  Why is that newsworthy or “Factoid” worthy to Neilsen?

-pjc

Hype Machine Churns Out the Hits

Hype Machine is an amazingly simple website that answers one question very well;  Which tracks are being covered most by music blogs over the past three days?

The result is a very easy to understand and access set of charts that should put Billboard magazine to shame.

Beyond being an solid source for the popular music being covered by thousands of music bloggers, Hype Machine also has a player built into the bottom of their page which preloads with the song at the top of the particular chart you’ve selected.  Chart options include; Latest, Popular, Radio and Spy.  While Latest and Popular should be self-explanatory, Radio is actually monitoring songs beings played by online stations.  Spy is simply collecting random mp3 tracks from the music blogs being frequently checked – consider your “feeling lucky” option.

While I’ve only visited the Hype Machine a few times, most of the music I’ve heard has been heavy on the dance, remixes and mash-ups.  I will not claim to be an expert on current musical trends, but there may be some genres left out of their blog rotation.  One of the important elements that should be understood is the SEARCH function.  Type in an artist you know and not only will you find tracks available for both streaming and downloading, but you’ll also find references to other SIMILAR sounding artists.  A sound way to discover new sounds.

We will use this resource, along with other tools, to help us target the most popular music blogs to review.

-pjc

Wall Street Journal Explains the Social Music Success of Bon Iver

Late in December 2008, the WSJ posted an important and useful story about Wisconsinite Justin Vernon and the road from north woods recording obscurity to having record labels chasing him for deals.  Beyond a great story for aspiring music artists, there are some excellent resources listed in the article as well including TuneCore.com, CDBaby.com and SonicBids.com others.

The WSJ story concludes with some wisdom about the Internet causing the equivalent of the French Revolution for the old music industry.

Wall Street Journal Article: Musician Finds a Following Online, written by Shelly Banjo & Kelly K. Spors

-pjc

First Post – Music Video Channels, Websites and Stations

While keeping track of websites dedicated to promoting music video COULD be filed under our category of Promotional Resources, we believe that the explosion of online video is so great that Video deserves its own category within our special resource.  Above and beyond the YouTubes, Google Videos and FabChannel’s, there are dozens more waiting to be adopted by the music loving general public.  Our goals is to ride that awareness wave and report back to the musicians and bands who follow SMMuG so they know where they should be placing their latest videos.

-pjc

First Post – News, Trends and Events for the NEW Music Business

Just watching the news events of the collapsing old music industry could be a website by itself.  As opposed to dancing while the empire burns, we would rather help construct the new industry that uses technology to connect independent musicians to their fans, friends and followers.  This News category will help document the new foundation being built for the music business of the future.

-pjc

First Post – Music Merchandise Vendors & Suppliers

Whether your band is looking to have your disc duplicated or a t-shirt screen printed or a van graphic applied, there are so many businesses to help you, that we will attempt to get input from other bands of the best of the bunch.  Is DiscMakers the best place for disc duplication? Who do you contact about selling MP3 or Lossless files? Who is willing to help the small indy, diy bands?  We don’t know either, yet, but we’ll figure it out together.

-pjc

First Post – Promotional Resources for Musicians!

There are hundreds, potentially thousands, of websites dedicated toward helping musicians/bands promote their music in some way, shape or form.  Among the noise, there are like a few dozen that can truly provide SIGNIFICANT benefits to independent artists & musicians. We will attempt to provide reviews and feedback on those MOST important web resources for the promotion of your music.

-pjc

First Post – WebCasters

This area will be dedicated toward providing profiles on streaming audio/radio stations that feature music by new artists/bands. With over 20,000 stations streaming music online, independent bands DO have a place to turn to in order to get their music heard.  The problem is know which of those thousands of stations will pay some attention to new music and new artists . We will BE that resource for bands.

-pjc

First Post – PodCasters

This category will be dedicated to review PodCasts that either feature or specifically include music from new artists & bands. This will not be necessarily a review of those podcasts, but more of an attempt to connect bands to those specific podcasters.

-pjc

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