The Top 10 Music Social Networks

February 4th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

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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There Are 27 Responses So Far. »

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.
Pingback by navigatum-auditionis.info » Comment on The Top 10 Music Social Networks by Gordon R on 3 March 2008:

[...] ist für ihn Istanbul. So können die Produktivitätsverluste beziffert werden, indem ein Land z, Gordon R: B, Gordon R: mit Finnland verglichen wird, Gordon [...]
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….
Comment by Placide on 6 July 2008:

Free iTunes By Indies is a brand new social network that provides fans with real money to buy iTunes or anything else they choose. Artists serve as the sponsors for the requests that fans have for iTunes or and in turn are awarded money by the fans should they deem them cool. There currently are and will continue to be a plethora of excellent promotional tools that artists can use to expose their music and grow a fan base, however I feel that services that bring fans to an artists music and provide artists with money based on the interaction is the future.
Comment by eCover Design PRO on 30 July 2008:

Excellent articles. Very useful. Thanks
Comment by mp3lover on 15 October 2008:

why you don’t make toplist 30 or 40 musical social networks?
Comment by Jimmy Shelter on 2 November 2008:

@mp3lover
In my opinion, it’s better to focus your attention on a small number of social networks, then try to keep 30 or 40 networks up to date.
Comment by Morgan Sully on 26 December 2008:

I wouldn’t under estimate Soundcloud either. I just signed up for it and it give s really nice interface for uploading and sharing original music. It’s got a really interesting ‘drop box’ feature for embedding in your blog, myspace, facebook. “The platform takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending & distributing music for artists, record labels & other music professionals.”

I’m a particular fan of their ‘timeline commenting’ feature that allows folks to comment at specific times on tracks you upload - you can actually see the wave file of your uploaded track displayed on the screen as well as coments people add to it - very helpful feature for getting feedback on our work.
Comment by RockMy Events on 18 January 2009:

Hi all.

I would like to introduce all of you to RockMy Events (http://rockmyevents.com).

RockMy Events is a new kind of social network, where you can register your artist, promote your band and notify all your events.

Using this site is very simple: once activated your user account, you will be able to register your artist and start to post all your upcoming events, geolocating them using the google maps interface. Let people know where you’ll play next time!

You can sign up and be able to notify events all around the world even if you don’t belong to a band.

A final notes: RockMy Events is completely FREE!

Take a look and enjoy RockMy Events!
Comment by brixx on 24 January 2009:

Rebel City Music is also one of the best music social networks that I know.
Comment by Jameel on 19 February 2009:

I recommend checking out flashwidgetz.com. It is a pretty cool social music website. It is not a site with millions of users, but the site is very feature rich and makes it easy to find what i need.
Comment by Anton on 5 May 2009:

Great info on this blog. We just made a bunch of stickers for our band at stickerjunkie.com. Were getting more traffic locally on our myspace page. We will need to make tons more stickers after we sign up for more networking sites that we found here!

-Anton
Comment by kyle huffstetler on 26 June 2009:

check out tunesavvy.com

Tunesavvy.com
Find Musicians, Find Gigs, Find Entertainment

Tunesavvy is a free social-networking website for musicians and entertainment seekers. The goal of Tunesavvy is not only to link musicians with entertainment seekers, but also to link musicians with other musicians.

• Profiles:
Post your music, upcoming events, videos, pictures, etc.

• Music Player:
Create Playlists and play music from Tunesavvy users as you browse the site.

• Co-Branded Customized Yahoo search URL’s:
Profits split between user and Tunesavvy.

• Browse:
Search for local musicians or gigs by genre, pay, distance, age, etc.

• Event Listings:
Post your upcoming events

• Message Board:
Topic Specific message boards, equipment listing, ticket exchange.

• Articles:
Post and browse pertinent music and business related news and articles.

• Top Rated:
Browse and search the Top Rated Users, Music, Articles, and all other content.

• Favorites:
Add and sort your favorite songs and users.
Comment by JohnG on 27 July 2009:

I’d say MusicianForest is another that’s worthy of noting.

It’s Musician to Musician networking.
Comment by exEo on 9 August 2009:

StreetsCrack.com (Face Book Like Music Social Netowork with free music dropped every day for download. check it out
Comment by MyspacePlays on 14 August 2009:

Hey,
We are a Myspace Music Promotional company! We offer such services as:
100,000 Plays and Views for 19.99
1,000,000 Plays and Views for 49.99
10,000,000 Plays and Views for 199.99

and we offer bigger packages to producers/managers/labels to spread throughout their music pages!

We also offer a Friend Boosting package!
It is 49.99 and you will have 1 year VIP on 10 different popular adder sites!
We will be promoting to over 3 million people over the course of the year and expect 10%-15% of them to actually come through and use the websites, and that’s on top of the people who already use it!

We have been the leading myspace music promotional service since 2005 and we do offer a 100% Risk-Free Money Back Guarantee !

Our Website is PlaysViews.com

to learn more go to the FAQ section on PlaysViews.com

Feel Free to email us if you have any questions/ interests!

Thank you for your time and we look forward to work with you!

PlaysViewsEnt@Yahoo.Com
PlaysViews.Com

over 20,000 Friends at PlaysViews.Com
Comment by Beatrix Fröhlich on 27 September 2009:

There are a lot of music social networks in the universe of internet - most of them are very huge but closed in itsself!

I’m very grateful to NING because they help to creat your OWN OPEN music socialnetwork!
I want to invite you to one of these
Visit Lestfm - Friends of music and art
http://lestfm.ning.com
We share music for free - we offer free services to our artists and we are linked to more than 100 social networks!
it’s just a matter of time to become known in the space of internet!
Comment by B-man on 22 October 2009:

Ha! The majority of these sites listed dont even break the top million rank. Why on earth would we spend time directing traffic and doing all the work that the music website should be doing themselves? Even though everyone hates on myspace they still have millions and millions of people searching for music on the site. And where is Facebook on this list? This list is a f-in joke
Comment by Giovanni on 26 November 2009:

Hi,
you forget Thounds, the new music social network to make music in a new collaborative way.

Check it out at http://www.thounds.com - What music are you thinking?