The folks over at ELECTROGARDEN.com moved their site into its next phase yesterday when they announced they’ve finished more than a year’s worth of beta testing and design.

Although they’ve been around since 1999, we have yet to see whether this site will be able to attract listeners and fans over and above artists themselves.

Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s PRWeb release:

Electrogarden users are musicians, DJ’s, bands and artists, and fans of “Electronic, Industrial, Gothic, and Indie music” that network and socialize among themselves and with their fans using the site’s interactive options. Site feature highlights include: blogs, fully customizable personal profile pages, music media management in various audio and video formats, podcast music stations, guestbooks, comments and member reviews.

“The site caters to music producers, artists and DJ’s and allows highly personalized profiles to be created with audio tracks, videos, and individual forums”. Artists and members can manage their pages online with an easy to use admin interface, add friends, create music stations, and much more. There are “music reviews, articles, and feature interviews” filling out the site content.

Despite being online for 9 years, this site appears to still be in its infancy compared to sites like reverbnation.com. One of the biggest drawbacks I can see is that the site is poorly designed for the Web 2.0 world. It’s not particularly intuitive, user friendly or easily navigated. It takes a lot of clicks to get anywhere. It also fails to make viral actions easy - there isn’t even a ’share’ link on artist profiles for email or Facebook.

If you’ve got some free time and the Electronic/Industrial/Goth market is your thing, slap up a profile. Electrogarden appears to have a pretty loyal fanbase in that market and its great to have another avenue for fans to reach your music. Otherwise, I wouldn’t concentrate any serious efforts on this site just yet.