JupiterResearch reports that social networking sites such as MySpace "generate more community-related music activity than Yahoo! Music, AOL Music or MTV.com. According to a new JupiterResearch report, "Music and Community: Low Cost, Authentic Promotion," 48 percent of music discoverers find out about music from friends."
David Card, Vice President and Senior Analyst at JupiterResearch and author of the report said "Music marketers should leverage community sites, such as MySpace, to recreate the feel of personal recommendations of friends, not only are these sites free, but they can be effective music discovery tools."
The report uses the music group The Black Eyed Peas as a case study on MySpace, Yahoo! Music, AOL Music and MTV.com. MySpace overwhelmingly outperformed all the others by far as it generated hundreds of thousands of "friends" of the band, and profile views and song views in the millions. The mainstream music sites had numbers only in the hundreds on the best of them.
David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan added that "Using community sites as a marketing platform is inexpensive, but it requires a do-it-yourself approach, MySpace, for example, does the Flash encoding for music streaming and enables e-mailing, but not much more. Promoters should market actively on these sites and push new songs, albums, videos, or tours."
Still, overall, the social networking sites, at this time, are the only online music marketing game in town. Entertainers need to embrace them wholeheartedly.
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