iLike and TuneCore may be a bit late to the monetizing music party, following sites like Grooveshark, but they have now arrived in full force. Today TuneCore and iLike announce that indie artists will be able to earn money from people listening to and sharing their music via iLike.
iLike is poised for great leaps in success right now. They are rumored to be the favorite music application for FaceBook to endorse as its preferred app for a FaceBook music integration. Not only that, just this past summer iLike made several improvements by offering free streaming of full tracks and integrating an ad platform into their service, showing a keen eye for monetization and long term growth.
Why partner with TuneCore? iLike is more of a social discovery service for music, and TuneCore is a music distribution service. Together they have the ability to help artists make money off of the songs that they write and sing when people listen to them.
More and more services are going to this new digital revenue model in the music industry. Instead of waiting to be picked up by a label, going to the studio, going to press, advertising and going on tour, this new model allows artists to make money in real time, simultaneously with a tour, merchandise sales, CD pressing and more. No more waiting for big business to catch up. It also offers a bit of real time feedback - if you aren’t going to be popular, your level of digital revenue will reflect that immediately instead of waiting to release a CD that might fail.
What does the this proliferation of turnkey music monetization services mean for musicians? It allows them to basically be their own label. Artists submit their music via TuneCore and then it is played via iLike, and everywhere iLike is found. This includes FaceBook, embedded playlists on blogs, and more. TuneCore also gives artists access to iLike’s entire network, including hi5, Bebo, Orkut and more. TuneCore also serves music to sites like Rhapsody, Yahoo, MTV and Amazon. Artists then keep 100% of the money they make via the service.
Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike, said “As the music industry continues to reinvent itself, we believe it’s critical to offer independent musicians equal opportunity alongside major-label artists.” And he’s right - this online network created for artists by combining the reach of iLike and TuneCore enables a band or artist’s music to be heard in as many places as it would be it released by a major label. That’s a huge advantage for an artist to make money doing something they love, and isn’t that every musician’s dream? To get paid to do what they love?
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Back in May, I wrote about Joe Lieberman and the list of terrorist propaganda videos he found on YouTube. He and his staff identified videos branded by terrorist organisations like al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam (a.k.a Ansar al-Sunnah) and al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb.
Earlier today, YouTube posted an update to their community guidelines indicating that they’d much more strictly be enforcing their standards with regard to hate speech. It isn’t clear from the blog post today that this is in response to Joe Lieberman’s objections from back in May, but all the coverage today seems to make that assumption.
Is it Free Speech or Fire in a Theatre?
An interesting discussion ensued after I introduced the issue when it first arose. I expressed sympathy for Joe Lieberman’s position and endorsed the position that YouTube should actually enforce the existing terms of service contract that they had and remove videos from any organization that calls for violence against others (not to mention the genocide and destruction of nations).
The response from our readers was mixed, and confusing at best. For some reason, what I said was seen as a call for censorship, and in the black and white world of the Internet these days, anything that can be construed as censorship is automatically evil. Most of the comments on the original post echoed this sentiment from Mashable reader Calvin Spealman:
Freedom of speech is absolute.
If we can’t beat them without silencing their message, we obviously aren’t being convincing enough to those they are converting. Fight them with our own free speech and expression.
Despite how it was construed, what I was actually calling for was an even enforcement of the terms of service. Amongst the many times I’ve called out YouTube for improper censorship, the most germane to this issue is the very notable example of what YouTube has historically done to those would refute the propaganda that the terrorists put out.
Michelle Malkin had created a music montage showing victims of Muslim terrorist attacks in response to the Muhammed riots and other Muslim, just the very thing that Calvin and dozens other said was needed to combat this sort of thing without resorting to censorship. Unfortunately, and unlike the original terrorist videos, this one was pulled from the service, citing promotion of hate speech and violence.
What’s Changed?
It’s unclear exactly what’s changed, except that YouTube’s given a nod to the Senator, and a quote to the Washington Post that they’re going to decide things on a case by case basis.
Generally, the only thing that seems to influence Google to do the right thing in the past has been a combination of media and governmet pressure. The most prime example of this which springs to mind is the case of Orkut and the literal infiltration of pedophiles onto the system. The story stayed on our radar for quite some time, starting with reports in January of 2007 as noted by Pete, the problem continuing to grow on into September when Google decided to do something about policing their community, as noted by Kristen.
Google continued to protect the identities of pedophiles from Brazilian authorities for months, as noted by Sean in October and myself in April of this year. Finally, in late April, Google finally caved to widespread media criticism and governmental authority and began cooperating with police in turning over the identities of those trafficking in pictures and video of under-aged sex acts.
This is indicative of the timeline and political stance of Google in the matter of protecting terrorists the right to document their acts of aggression and spread their propaganda. The question is whether or not this indicates a true commitment to proper enforcement of the terms of service in a fair and morally conscionable manner, or if it’s window dressing to appease the government.
YouTube’s unfair appropriation of censorship doesn’t end with terrorists, as many citizen journalists worldwide (as well as many Chinese dissidents) have seen Google cave on governmental censorship requests to protect their business interests.
We Need to be Smart About This
As Uncle Ben used to say, with great power comes great responsibility. The tools that are accessible to us as active users of the Internet give us the power to broadcast our messages to an international audience. A flippant thought tossed onto the web can end up in front of hundreds of millions, or just a few very important people.
This sort of power represents a threat as well as a tool those who are charged by the citizens of the world to maintain order for us all, and can mean the same to those who would endeavor to threaten the order of things that we enjoy.
As I stated in the closing of just about every article I’ve done on this topic, it is the responsibility of companies who maintain large megaphones like YouTube to build in community and algorithmic controls that prevent the system from being abused, not simply because it makes the system less annoying for the majority of the userbase or even out of a moral obligation to inhibit the activities of people who wish to end the lives of their fellow man.
The pen is mightier than the sword, and the digital pen, as it were, is the most important tool we have these days. If we want to keep it safe from the grubby paws of governmental intervention, companies like Google must implement and enforce standards of policing the community. Otherwise, the government will do that for us, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we do not want that.
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Facebook may be the de facto leader in the United States, but in Japan (and other areas across the globe) it has some significant work to do if it wants to catch up to the local social network flavors.
But according to comScore, it’s doing just that. Over the past year, Facebook’s growth has tripled and it’s quickly gaining ground on Japan’s top social network, Mixi.JP. In fact, Facebook grew an astounding 213 percent over the past year, while Mixi grew by just 3 percent and MySpace inched forward just 10 percent.
That said, Facebook is still way behind Mixi and other social networks in Japan. During the last year, 12 million visitors used Mixi, while just 172,000 visited Facebook.
Regardless, Facebook’s astounding growth in Japan and other places across the globe underscore an interesting development in the company’s next phase of growth: for quite a while, it was a US social network, but as it continues to improve its services and use its localization efforts, it’s quickly realizing that Facebook will appeal to people all over the globe.
And in the process, I wonder if Facebook can be the first major social network to break out of the walled-garden mentality that has developed in the space and become the leading social network both domestically and abroad.
As it stands, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Mixi, and countless other social networks reign supreme in certain countries throughout the world. But as Facebook’s popularity grows all over the world – it currently does best in the US, Canada, and South Africa – it’s slowly but surely bucking that trend.
For years, we’ve listened to countless social networks claim that they have what it takes to be the world’s supreme social network that people from anywhere would love and enjoy. But so far, not one company has been able to deliver.
But as we consider the growth Facebook is enjoying and delve a bit deeper into its performance across the globe, we quickly find that its localization service has worked extremely well and it’s quickly becoming a major player in many of the major foreign markets. That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to control those markets and it doesn’t even mean that it will win out. But it does mean that Facebook is the first social network in recent memory to fully grasp a presence in more countries than its own.
And that, for sure, is an important first step in taking a more global role.
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This is a guest post written by Bernard Moon, Vice President of the Lunsford Group, a private holding company consisting of entities in technology, media, research & consulting, health care, investment boutique, and real estate. Bernard blogs at Silicon Moon.
The recent announcement of Google’s Lively product has created a stir in some circles, but for me it’s a yawner. Why? It’s another Google product not related to their bread and butter of search and ads. The company was built on a philosophy that products should sell themselves, so their marketing efforts are minuscule and their product development process seems undeveloped. Also “products” are not really great design but great engineering. While this approach has been wondrous for Google’s core search business and related profit margins, it has created misguided results with possibly billions of dollars left on the table.
Similar to Lively, Google’s social networking service, Orkut, was built by Orkut Büyükkökten on his 20% time. In typical fashion, Orkut was launched with little marketing strategy and received some initial fanfare.
When Google finally opened Orkut up and allowed anyone to join in 2006, it randomly became the leading social network in Brazil. While Alexa rankings are inaccurate, Orkut recently became the 11th most trafficked site in the world. In most situations, this would be a wild success, but imagine if they actually targeted specific segments in the U.S. instead of throwing dice? Orkut strategically targeted India, which has led to its leadership position there, but what other markets has Google missed?
I’m not fond of “what if” scenarios, but what if they opened up earlier and targeted the college market in 2004 as Facebook was slowly spreading through the Ivy League schools? Or if they tailored it to the teen market in the U.K.? It seems Google is now paying attention to Orkut’s growth and development, but they already missed several larger opportunities.
Google Product Search service (formerly Froogle) was another missed opportunity. Officially launched in 2002, it wallowed in mediocrity for years. I don’t know if this was a 20% project, but it seems like another engineering project not coupled with a product manager and little marketing guidance. If there is one area that has been a consistent startup goldmine from the first boom to today, it is shopping comparison engines.
CNET acquired mySimon for $700 million (2000), Yahoo acquired Kelkoo for $640 million (2004), eBay acquired Shopping.com for $620 million (2005), Shopzilla sold for $525 million (2005), and several others including Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Jellyfish.com for $50 million (2007). Shopping search engines generate great revenue and accumulate an incredible amount of valuable user data. What has Google done with Froogle? How much revenue has it generated since 2002? How many millions have been left at the doorsteps of its competitors?
Gmail’s invitation-only beta release began in April 2004. I remember receiving an invite from my friend at Google that month and testing it out. I quickly fell in love with Gmail. I loved how it grouped email conversations, the label function and the clean user interface. Over the next couple years I ran into more fans of Gmail, so I kept wondering when it would open up. It finally did in February 2007, but I questioned the rationale of this decision. What if they opened it up sooner? What if they promoted it beyond a link off its homepage?
Today, there are approximately 262 million Yahoo! email users, 256 million Live Hotmail users, 87 million Gmail users and 49 million AOL users worldwide. With my biases, I have to ask why is the best free email service a distant third?
This leads me to question Google’s approach to product development and marketing beyond their core services. While it seeks to organize the world’s information, there are products on its periphery where design and marketing can be factors towards success and untapped revenues. Google’s engineering driven culture that has doubtingly created enormous growth and shareholder value, but great engineering and design is not mutually exclusive.
Looking at Apple, their company culture is driven by design and user experience. Engineering supports the creation of Apple’s designs, and this consistent approach has served the company well in its new era.
I believe Google can learn a little from Apple and its obsessive design culture and incredible marketing machine. While I believe Google should always be an engineering driven culture and company, some room should be left for the design freaks and marketing geniuses to optimize the value of their treasure chest of innovation.
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Earlier this month, I shared with you my post that called for a big wake-up call for Social Networking sector, thanks to the presence of too many me-too players at a time when recent traffic trends are showing signs of hitting a plateau. Hitwise recently reported that in the US, MySpace and Facebook ranked 1st and 2nd had 95% and 93% repeat visitors for the month.
The May 2008 traffic data from comScore furthers that argument. Another interesting finding of the May 2008 data – Facebook is doing much better than MySpace in the overseas markets.
Nevertheless, of late, I have stopped taking traffic on face value, and instead almost always juxtapose it to how much money you make off those page views. (Dave McClure recently chastised me for thinking too much in the short term.)
Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni earlier pointed out that Facebook will take in $265 million and MySpace will bring in $755 million in 2008. So unless the overseas (and overall page view) growth translate into real big dollars, our friends at Facebook (and MySpace) have problems. Experts believe that the answer is in better relevance in display advertising – still the dominant form of advertising on the social networks.
Facebook vs Others
The traffic trends have to be troubling for for geographic hits such as Orkut and Friendster. The overseas growth of Facebook also calls into question the veracity of the decision by AOL to pay $850 million for Bebo. Some data crunching by Andrew Chen (using the newly announced Google Trends) shows that Facebook is making big headway in markets such as UK, France, China, and India. Orkut is very popular in India, while as the map shows Bebo is big in UK and other European countries.
I think it is these guys who need to worry the most with Facebook’s march & MySpace’s rear guard action. I suspect, if Facebook continues to grow, MySpace could opt for buying market share.
But if you take a larger view, Chen’s conclusion, that “Social networks have weaker network effects than previously speculated,” is quite prescient. As someone once noted, social networks are like night clubs – there is always a cooler, hipper, funkier joint being planned by someone.
Over past few years, generally described as the golden years of social networking have led to the sector’s giants resting on their laurels. The fundamental nature (and utility) of social networks hasn’t really changed. The platform-ization of social networks has led to the rise of social apps that are best described as time wasters. You can be fascinated by vampire bites and what not but in the end, there is a finite amount of time you can waste.
In other words, Social Networks need to find new purposes for people to come back every day and be loyal. I had argued in my previous post that the world of social networks is going to be divided into two – the big players (MySpace, Facebook) and niche players (Dogster, Dopplr etc.)
In a recent chat, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini pointed out that they are adding 2000 new niche social networks every day and are now upto 315,000 networks. The niche is allowing the company to get even good non-optimized, straight-up average eCPMs from AdSense. She pointed out that they are about 3 to 4 times better than the average for general one-size-fits-all social networks. “This is because the social networks on Ning are organized around well-defined topics and interests – skiing, smart cars, diabetes, etc. As a result, contextual advertising works more effectively for Ning than it does for other general social networks,” she said.
Photo Courtesy of comScore via C/Net News.com’s The Social. Social world map courtesy of Le Monde via O’Reilly Radar
Kevin Marks of the OpenSocial blog is letting it be known that OpenSocial will be throwing an “OpenBar” on Monday in Austin for SXSW. They’re inviting anyone looking to develop for or use OpenSocial to come out and talk with the folks behind the API, as well as others third parties looking to work with the code. ‘Course, you could also meet up and just be, you know, social and enjoy some Google hospitality.
For those few of you who may have missed out the OpenSocial announcement and don’t know what it’s all about, let us play catch up for a moment. It launched back in November of last year and is a set of APIs that allows you to build one application and deliver it across multiple social networks. Some of the networks include Orkut, MySpace, Hi5 and more. You can check out examples of what’s been built so far by taking a look at the examples on their apps page.
You’ll find the crew behind the OpenSocial effort in the back room of McCormick & Schmick’s on Monday, March 10 from 6-8 p.m. in Downtown Austin. The first 100 people will receive free t-shirts and you can find location details here.
(Here’s a kind of tangential Easter egg. The OpenBar event was published as an Upcoming listing. Of course, it seems sensible for them to do so. But for those unaware, Upcoming is a Yahoo property.)
A comment on this post counts as an entry in our Mashable Rocks contest!
Here’s a nice little announcement for all you photo-loving orkut users: the limit of the number of photos you can share has been increased to 1000, and it’s now much easier to upload a lot of photos if you’re an Internet Explorer user. People still use Internet Explorer? Weird.
Anyway, if you want to try it out, log into orkut, go to your albums page, and click on “New! Upload multiple photos;” the application will guide you through the installation process. After that, click on “add photos,” select as many photos as you like, and click on “upload photos” to finish.
[image credit: official orkut blog]
Following on the Open Social support of the MySpace Developer Platform, Google has launched services for programmers planning to use Open Social to build applications for its Orkut social network, including a hackathon scheduled for Feb. 14-15 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., as well as forums and chat. End users should be able to check out the results of all this openness on MySpace in early March and on Orkut later this month.
The last 7 days have been filled with announcements large and small by the preeminent social networks on the Web. February 4 marked the launch of the MySpace Developer Platform, which the company hopes will repeat the success of Facebook’s own Web application catalogue. Later in the week, Facebook celebrated its own launch, though one certainly less headline-grabbing; the company activated a Spanish-language version of its network, in order to compete (with sites like Orkut and Hi5) more effectively in international reaches. Bebo also grabbed a moment in the spotlight due to rumor spread across the blogosphere about Google’s purported interest in purchasing the Euro-centric social site. A rumor which Kara Swisher of All Things Digital was quick to silence.
Let’s focus again on Facebook here, though, because, as was reported yesterday by Justin Smith of Inside Facebook, a memo from one of the company’s representatives, Sasha Rush, delivered shortly after the Facebook Spanish announcement, mentions a plan to expand the power of the network’s mutli-lingual framework, born of a product dubbed “Translations.†
The expansion, according to Rush, would encompass not only the network’s basic features, but also the application marketplace that the 60-million-strong membership has come to know and love.
Yes, that’s right. Not only can you post in Spanish some gripping bits of news of the latest beer bash to sweep your campus. You’ll soon have the ability to play games - though I’m guessing not “Scrabuloso†- in a flavor that suits non-English-speaking folk.
I must say, this is a very welcome development, as the attention given by various Web-based tech companies to bridge lingual divides has been, while understandable given the limited resources of startups and relatively young and rough-edged entities like Facebook, too little for too long. The more comprehensive “Translations†becomes, the better the world is for it.
Gotta get crackin’ on my Deutsche lessons. Why travel to Frankfurt in physical form, after all, when I can play online board games with some German counterparts via these spiffy, Internetastic tubes? (I kid.)