Oh How The Mighty Have Fallen

I never liked MySpace even when everyone said you HAD to have a MySpace page.  It was ugly.  After they let users personalize their page, it got worse.  Half the time the music player worked.  It was a good way to hear a musician's offering, when it did work.  For awhile it was the big game in town.  How quickly things change.

I was a consultant on a project that was geared towards high school kids. I worked with Scott Gerber, who was a student at NYU at that time.  He showed me his Facebook acccount.  It was only open to college students then.  He told me this was the future.  Lately people are writing Facebook's obituary.  The latest cry is that Tumblr is taking over Facebook.

MySpace was sold to ad network Specific Media for $35 million.  Newscorp paid $580 million for it in 2005.  Now there's a write off.

Facebook will be launching their music offering.  Not quite sure what that will mean.  About 85% of the people in my circle are on Facebook and are active users.  I've seen people post some really dumb things and I've seen it as a great way to keep up with my relatives in other parts of the county.  I'm not an active user.   I haven't used it to listen to music or keep up with my favorite artists.  It will be interesting to see where music and the social network go.

MySpace Left Out

A posting on today's Cynopsis had a list of the top ten video streaming sites. MySpace is not among them. Just a short year ago, people were still turning to MySpace to hear music. YouTube seems to be the destination for both video and audio. Thousands of songs have user made videos which are essentially stills edited together with the music and uploaded as a video. It's an easier way to hear a song. The MySpace player still takes time to load, which could be sending users to YouTube. YouTube is easily accessible from computers to iPhones.

Top Online Video Brands Ranked by Total Streams - April 2009
Including Month-over-Month and Year-over-Year Growth

Video Brand Apr-09 Streams (000) M/M % Change Y/Y % Change Share of Streams
Online Video Usage 9,452,996 -2.3% 24.2% 100.0%
YouTube 5,490,204 0.2% 35.5% 58.1%
Hulu 373,290 7.1% 490.4% 3.9%
Yahoo! 203,628 -12.2% -8.1% 2.2%
Fox Interactive Media 201,362 -3.0% -38.8% 2.1%
Nick Kids and Family 175,917 -10.3% 15.9% 1.9%
MSN/Windows Live 164,422 -2.7% 9.8% 1.7%
ABC.COM 148,830 -15.9% 144.8% 1.6%
MTV Networks Music 143,356 15.7% 359.6% 1.5%
Turner Digital Network 130,559 -5.1% 60.0% 1.4%
CNN Digital Network 112,469 8.7% 32.7% 1.2%
Source: Nielsen VideoCensus

The audio is not the best, but if you want a quick reference, it's a great resource.

The Ever Narrowing Music Business and It's Effects

The fragmentation of the music business has affected so many areas beyond the major labels, which I don’t think a lot of people realize. There was a posting in Celebrity Access today about the uber-concerts/music festivals. Australian promoters such as Andrew McManus have had to renegotiate deals with agents and managers, McManus for the 54 shows he was to promote. The shrinking markets and sinking Australian dollar account for some of it. "The demise of the dollar has given me basically two hours' sleep for 10 days, working round the clock, dealing with umpteen managers, umpteen number of agents, to try to restructure the whole landscape of each deal to the point where I have actually sacked a number of deals," McManus told the Brisbane Times.
"Either the acts have taken a reduction or I've got rid of them … That's how bleak the whole ****ing thing's been."

For the most part, the record companies were doing us a great favor by narrowing the market. They limited the amount of musical offering each month. With new technology and options like CD Baby and TuneCore, anyone can record music on their laptop and have it up for sale/distribution within days. This completely dilutes the market. With so many choices how do you know what’s good, what you like, etc? There are sites like Sonic Boomers that suggest music they think boomers would like and they do a good job of it. For the most part, you could spend all day trying to keep up with every new act that comes out.

The inexhaustible number of musicians out there, which I think is a major reason for the declining interest in festival shows, really hit me when I looked at the list of bands playing CMJ. Here are the names of the acts I recognized for today’s schedule out of approximately 272 listed:

• Charlie Louvin is 81 years old and he is possibly the Grandfather of alt country
• George Clinton, know as the godfather of funk
• Sam Champion I know them because they are named after the once local and now national weatherman
• It’s Not You It’s Me Took note of their name a few weeks back, have no idea what they sound like
• The Dears Canadian band that has been around for a few years
• Juliana Hatfield Started in the Blake Babies
• Ari Gold I don’t really know this artist, I just know the name as the agent on Entourage.
• Matt Keating was managed by a friend
• KaiserCartel is managed by a friend, but my husband saw their show a few years back and liked them and bought their CD
• Dave Doobinin was on the bill a few times with All Night Chemists
• Coheed & Cambria on Columbia Records. Richard on the Howard Stern show once wet his pants during one of their shows, as he couldn’t tear himself away from the performance to use the bathroom.

Technically I’ve only heard the music of 8 of 272 of them. Not sure if this means I am out of touch or the market is so saturated that it’s impossible to know. It's also quite a statement that 272 bands will be playing in NY tonight and most of it occurs below 14th St and it does not include all the day parties and performances that are not offical. I realize that my expertise is in adult alternative, but that genre has become pretty broad. A musician I know said that CMJ seems like a bunch of MySpace friends coming to NY to play. I don't know that you can fill a stadium or book a festival around a bunch of MySpace friends.