The Top 10 Music Social Networks
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There are a lot of social networks online and more are created each and every day to compete in niches such as dating, pet owners, and sports fans. Knowing which ones will provide you with the resources and interaction you need to market your music is hard.
To help you get started in that process, here are ten of the best music oriented social networks currently on the Internet (that are not MySpace). If you are in a band, these are absolute must use sites for the promotion process. You should have accounts on as many as possible, at least to explore and test out their features.
MusoCity - This social network is designed around the concept of bringing together fans, musicians, artists, venues, and retailers. You can sign up for free and start sharing profiles, music preferences, and local stores to see what might be going on in your area.
Flotones - This site provides resources for fans and artists to interact with their material. Its main feature is one that allows you to promote your content through cell phones with wallpapers and ringtones. You can do this through your MySpace profile, at your shows, or on a website.
Sellaband - The Sellaband concept was controversial at the start but has turned into a surprisingly agile idea that has grown exponentially since its launch. The idea is that fans and listeners become the producers, investing money into their favorite bands to give them a recording opportunity. The investors get a small cut of the profits and the artists get a chance to record their music, as well as pick up half of the ad revenue from their music being downloaded.
Last.fm - This classic and extremely popular music networking site allows users to keep track of what music they listen to, then search for new music based on their past listening habits. Other features include the ability to listen to new music, learn more about artists, find people who have similar tastes, find local shows, create charts of top songs, and publish any of this information to a different website. Artists can upload and promote their music and videos for free.
Haystack - Another social network that allows users to search through and create their own music preferences lists, Haystack brings musicians and fans together with free, shareable videos, images, music and review content.
Mercora Radio - The social network at Mercora allows you to listen to music for free through its online radio service. It allows you to search your own hard drive as well and broadcast all legally purchased music on a radio channel to the world. Bands and artists can create their own playlists, mixing their tracks with favorites from other bands.
Sonific - The sonific interface has two sides. Side one is devoted to allowing musicians to upload and share their music through widgets on the Sonific home page. Side two allows users to access and listen to that music for free, wherever they want to put it - either on a blog, a social networking profile, or a different website. Direct downloads are not allowed.
Midomi - This site combines the same popularity of regular music social networking with some interesting and exciting new technology that allows people to actually search for songs and artists by humming or singing part of a song. It is the perfect way to find that song that you just cannot remember the name of. While it is not quite as streamlined for artist use, the novelty of its design makes it a probably contender for future growth and expansion, perfect for getting in on the ground floor of now.
MOG - This social network allows you to find new music to listen to by filtering through peoples’ profiles with custom search parameters. You will also find news, music reviews, streaming audio, TV features, and YouTube clips. Imagine MySpace Music as its own site with a few new features.
iJigg - This site allows you to comment on other songs and share your own favorites or home made tracks. The rating system allows people to decide what becomes popular and there are two different account-types - listener and artist.
Looking for ways to use social networking to promote your band? Download you FREE chapter from Max Lowe’s Ultimate Guide to Promoting Your Music Online.
Looking for more social music tools? Check out The Top 10 Ways Fans Find Music on the Internet!
***UPDATE***
Here’s another great resource submitted by my friend Lou Plaia. His site at reverbnation.com is one of the pioneers of Music 2.0. With over 130,000 artists subscribed to their ton of services, this artist focused site is a must-have in your music marketing toolkit.
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you should add this service to the list. www.bandsofthemonth.com 
Great list, Max!
I'll admit a bias, but I think you should also include SongPlanet.com to your list. It's not gigantic ...
Great idea Max! We very much appreciate you including KnowTheMusicBiz.com in the search options you set up.
Keep up the great ...
Its hard to say whether they MySpace will be accommodating independent labels, but from the looks of it... I doubt ...
I like most of these tips. They're really useful. You could also use these tips when writing a blog with ...
I think a blog is ESSENTIAL to a band's website - a blog is about communicating with fans.
And I think ...
Yeah but their site wasn't covered in adsense and affiliate links like yours, Max.
So who's doing it right?
Comment by lou plaia on 20 February 2008:
Hello Max, it seems you may not have had a look at our site, Reverbnation.com. I believe we are the only site that offers tons of free innovative marketing tools for artists, labels, managers and venues all inside of a music only community. We are an ARTIST focussed site while all or most of the above are FAN focussed. This is not to say those other sites are not great, it just means that your statement “If you are in a band, these are absolute must use sites for the promotion process” seems to have missed the fact that most, if not all of those sites, are not offering any marketing tools to bring the music TO the masses. We have 130,000 artists using us as their homebase and are growing at an enormous rate which leaves me to belive we are doing something right. Please take a look and consider us in the future. Thank you.
Comment by maxlowe on 21 February 2008:
Hey Lou!
Thanks for stopping by. I’ve checked out reverbnation.com and MAN do you have a great thing going!
You’re right. Many of the sites we’ve covered so far are on the social networking side of things. That’s a big focus of The Ultimate Guide to Promoting Your Music Online because it’s important for artists to have a strong, well planned presence online before sending traffic to their MySpace/Facebook/Dot-Com. It’s like inviting your friends to a housewarming party before you’ve built the house…or putting on a show before you’ve rehearsed the set list.
With that said, reverbnation.com has some powerful tools for the promotion phase. If you’re ready to make the jump to Music 2.0, Lou’s site will give you a great head start…you can quote me on that!
Pingback by The Top 10 Music Social Networks by Graham English on 22 February 2008:
[…] music marketing blog (hat tip to Gerd Leonhard). The post that caught my immediate attention was The Top 10 Music Social Networks. Glad to see my favorite social music site, Last.fm, is on the […]
Comment by Rob Stefaniak on 22 February 2008:
I’m not sure you know what you are talking about. iMeem and iLike are both very popular and widely-used social networks / music discovery tools and they are not even listed here.
Comment by maxlowe on 22 February 2008:
Hi Rob,
You might want to check out this post: http://blog.maxlowe.net/2008/01/08/top-10-ways-fans-find-music-on-the-internet/
Comment by lkratz on 25 February 2008:
Hi !
You should add Jamendo to your list :
http://www.jamendo.com
It’s the biggest free music community in Europe. Thousands of albums released under creative commons licenses. Thus making all this good music available for free, to listen, to download and to share.
–
Laurent
Comment by Rob Stefaniak on 27 February 2008:
Max,
Your posts are redundant. Music Social Networks and Music Discovery Tools are pretty much one-in-the-same.
Comment by Gordon R on 2 March 2008:
Funnily enough a post at techcrunch recently listing imeem as one of the fastest growing social networks had a lot of people claiming it shouldn’t be on that list since it’s become ‘youtube for music’ now and promotes it’s music sharing tools over its social features.
Whatever they are they’re by far the biggest player in the game now, with quantcast reporting 1.5 billion hits per month.
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Comment by Matt @ Kurb on 20 March 2008:
which ones allow html?
because signing up to many of these sites would barely be worth the backlink.
I am not an advocate of artists signing up to every two bit “social” or “two point oh” site on the web.
For example: use purevolume if you’re an emo band. But not a house DJ. Use acidplanet or sectionz.
Cover the basics, and find your niche.
Reverb nation does have some excellent tools.
Trackback by Jimmy Shelter's Giglog on 20 March 2008:
Band promotion links II…
After my last post with links about promoting your music online I found another batch of great articles….