Facebook for Bands and Artists
We've done work for quite a few musicians over the last few years and it's been interesting to see the change in their approach to the web over that time.
MySpace has given artists an avenue to show off their wares for little or no cost. Facebook is rumoured to be coming to the music space with an offering for bands and artists. They are designing the platform to allow bands and labels to create artists pages, and allow various widgets to be embedded for music promotion, organizing events, and more. The trouble with MySpace is that as far as usability goes - it doesn't get much worse (don't even start me on design).
According to the report by PaidContent, "Among those widgets would be iLike, the most popular app inside Facebook, but will also include iTunes widgets for sampling (to begin with), and eventually buying music through Apple," the report states. "The service will still have the utilitarian sensibilities of the Facebook platform, the sources stress, rather than the more chaotic and flashy platform that MySpace has."
We here have a lot of respect for Facebook at the moment. It has the right mix of functionality, and thought behind it's workflow. The design, although plain, is organised and can't really be ruined by anyone.
The main reason we think Facebook will be a big thing for musicians and artists is the demographic of users. Kids use MySpace (and don't pay for music) and everyone else uses Facebook.
Let's see how it plays out. In the meantime, anyone for a game of Scrabulous?
David
Labels: cleaning-up-myspace, Facebook, MySpace, social-content
Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Cleaning up My Space
Unfortunately things don't have to be well designed to be popular. Never has this been more the case (on the web) than with the social networking juggernaut that is MySpace. The most highly visited site on the web, 50 million and counting, commands respect purely through its' staggering number of unique visitors.
Being mostly Generation X staffers at Efront, we've tried to stay away from MySpace for some time now mostly because it makes us feel old....but really for two main reasons :
- It's ugly - "u-g-l-y you aint got no alibi you ugly" ugly
- It's ridiculously poor to use
Admittedly, our sensibilities to usability on the web are a little higher than the average joe's but come on, there are some shockers there...
...I mean who has the login button on the left hand side?? By default you hit the sign up when trying to log in!
All this aside though, MySpace has a place in the world. Where there's people, there's money. People go there to socialise and to make 'friends'. For artists, MySpace represents a unique opportunity to present your music and video for free to a whole bunch of people. Hence how we arrived at having to face our first re-skin of a MySpace site.
Fiona Burnett is an accomplished saxophonist who is currently getting her site rebuilt by Efront. Along with the new site, a MySpace page needed to be created to complement her online presence.
After some Googling, a lot of head scratching and much tweaking, I'm really happy with what we've been able to do with Fiona's MySpace. We created a clean, neat, profile for Fiona that allows her to be a part of the MySpace community on her terms. When her site launches there'll be nice consistencies between the two and visitors won't feel like they've jumped into a completely new thing.
www.myspace.com/fionaburnett
So....now on to Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, LastFm....
Mark
Labels: cleaning-up-myspace, MySpace, templates, Web-Design-Melbourne
Posted on Thursday, June 21, 2007
