MySpace Music Community Activity Far Outpaces Online Music Sites

JupiterResearch: Sites such as MySpace generate more community-related music activity than Yahoo! Music, AOL Music or MTV.com. 48 percent of music discoverers find out about music from friends.

Music discoverers continue to use a broad variety of means to find out about music, 53 percent discover music through videos and 87 percent through radio, but word of mouth is a powerful way to expose and influence musical tastes. Sites that incorporate virtual friends are influential music marketing platforms.

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 new report studies how much activity related to the popular music group The Black Eyed Peas occurred on MySpace, Yahoo! Music, AOL Music and MTV.com. MySpace generated hundreds of thousands of friends of the band, and profile views and song plays in the millions. In contrast, mainstream music media sites counted artist community members in the hundreds, at best.

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. Music and Community: Low Cost, Authentic Promotion

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