Monday

The Battle for your Ears - Myspace vs Soundcloud



"In the Blue Corner, having registered his 100 millionth member and from the United States of America Tom "Myspace" Anderson! And in the Orange Corner, weighing in with 350,000 members from Sweden/Germany, Alex "& Erik" Soundcloud!"

So I thought I would share my opinion with you on something...

I have seen a major shift recently in the weapon of choice for musicians online (in the dance music sphere anyway) towards Soundcloud.

I love everything about Soundcloud. The branding, the cool players, the nice looking waves, the friendly error messages and the fact that a basic account is free.

But can it really contend with a heavyweight like Myspace, and can it be seen as a possible successor?

Certainly Facebook does not have a sniff when it comes to being a hub for Music, and although the social aspect of online activity in the main seems to have moved to Facebook and Twitter, Myspace have always clinged to their status as a "space for music"

New Myspace Music

Recently Myspace invested one or two dollars in a brand new all singing and dancing music streaming system, to try and cope with the ever encroaching Spotify, Napster, Last FM and the like.

Meanwhile, away from all this pop music orientated frenzy and glossy advertising, Soundcloud has been quietly asserting itself as a standard in a market that Myspace seems to have forgotten about - Dance Music.

I think this is the reason that Myspace profiles of artists and labels within our scene are beginning to look more and more tired without the day to day maintenance and activity. Spam messages build up in comments sections, blogs become stale, and music players get dusty.

In a further effort to modernise, Myspace installed traffic reporting modules into music profiles, and I think this will end up being their worst enemy. For the first time, you can accurately see who is looking at your profile, where in the World they are from and how long they are there for.

The Venga Digital Myspace is receiving precious little traffic, and I am seeing a real dip in the amount of plays on dance music artists' music players literally like 10% of the amount I was seeing this time last year, which bhegs the question - why are we spending resources keeping it up, and duplicating work that we're already doing on Soundcloud, Facebook and on the homepage?

Would we be better just sticking a big banner up there saying "Sorry, we've moved"??

For what it's worth, I surf Soundcloud profiles where I used to surf Myspace Music profiles, and I catch up with friends on Facebook when I used to speak to them on Myspace.

To be honest, I rarely use Myspace... and I am feeling that the same is ringing true for other artists and labels.

The problem is with Myspace, is that it is dated and cumbersome, you can only operate within Myspace. If you are on Facebook, Soundcloud, Twitter, Youtube you can feed your activity to any other profile, integrate it with other applications and combine them all! Myspace has no such exportable features, and again it is another potential nail in a coffin.

Myspace does have one saving grace... it is personalisable and gives brand presence, and unless Soundcloud start letting you loose with "Pimp my Profile" backgrounds (unlikely) it may just about survive, in lieu of the artist having a web site themselves.

It is funny that all artists and labels used to have fancy websites, then they ditched them all for social media sites, where now I think the smart money is on resurrecting the website (or using a blogspot/wordpress blog you can customise) and using it as a central point to feed blog posts, Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and Youtube into it.

Interested to hear any thoughts on the above, do you use Myspace any more?


6 comments:

  1. myspace needs to integrate with fb n such... their laggin quite alot. It has become a standard for basically presenting your work... but not so much for promoting. I use soundcloud all the time and it's very usefull for feedback as well. it's more in touch with the music than anything i've seen. and the personal touches with messages in the tracks is just right up my alley of acceptance.

    +1 soundcloud..
    -1 myspace

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  2. I still use MySpace quite a lot, and I still think it's the best place to go and find new music, but I agree with you about the exportable features and such, facebook and twitter and the like are a lot more flexible in that respect.

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  3. Agreed, Myspace need to make that player exportable yo!

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  4. i created a myspace after i made a soundcloud. its just so slow and processor hungry, going on the site seems a chor now. The only thing i like about it is that i can get rid of the myspace player and i have put my soundcloud one in instead.
    Facebook is just a socialising site and i think its pretty clear they dont want it to get like myspace when it was nothing but spam from hundreds of artists. What everyone needs is a new site altogether, thats a combination of all the best ones:
    soundcloud player embedding right in your homepage, maybe some sort of deal with soundcloud where you can make a soundcloud account with your 'perfect website' account - enabling commenting on tracks.
    it needs to have charts in your local area like reverb nation but based on soundcloud plays. needs to be easy to browse artists and share with your friends on it or facebook etc.
    And things like update me with future gigs, songs etc should be separate options to tick on the artists page so that no spam happens and only the people who really want to know find out - most annoying thing about myspace is inbox messages form clubs. something about an inbox message is way more offensive to people that seeing it in an events list or tab. all these sites are so flawed.

    facebook is the closest to this perfect website but they need to go about it with soundcloud as a team and make it easy to browse especially local stuff, and possibly even artists soon to be gigging locally. this will help everyone out - local talent, local clubs, artists on tour, fans, people looking for new music, soundcloud, facebook, ticket makers, advertising agencies, festivals, festival goers.

    i might not have explained this very well but im tired so fuck everyone. I'm fed up of the bullshit social media sites and everyone trying to charge for pro accounts when sites could just team up and make millions together with something like the idea i tried saying above?!

    If your a developer and happen to read this and want to make this dream site happen, you wanna hear my music, or see my social sites then contact me at one of the following shit websites:
    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Flash-Bang/128584857204743
    http://www.myspace.com/flash-bang
    http://soundcloud.com/flash_bang
    http://twitter.com/FlashBang_Music
    http://www.youtube.com/musicbyflashbang
    http://flashbang.official.fm/
    http://www.tracksandfields.com/users/Flash+Bang
    http://www.jango.com/bands/123231
    http://www.reverbnation.com/flashbangmusic
    http://flashbangmusic.tumblr.com/

    Too many if anything!

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  5. I am new to blogging, and I enjoyed reading your blog so much! It helped me get inspired to be consistent with it and you mentioned quite a few GREAT tips that I am going to apply in my future blogs. I really appreciate this information!
    purchase soundcloud plays

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  6. Well great post for comparison between Muspace & Soundcloud. as we all know that soundcloud is best platform for musicians or music producers because from there they can increase the number of plays or buy soundcloud plays & also create presence on soundcloud. MySpace is also a platform for musicians but not big as Soundcloud.Now a days Myspace is shifted towards the social media presence. Thanks sharing this interesting information with us.

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