Social Music - Where's the Long tail?

I've reviewed all the sites listed on TechCrunch's Social Music review by Seattle blogger Ryan Stewart, who I met last year at the Venture All Stars Event. Congrats on getting to TechCrunch status Ryan!

I'm a huge fan of electronic dance music, as are many others involved in technology, and I was excited to find some new artists I hadn't heard of. I thought their may be an up and coming artist somewhere in Europe that I had never heard of. So I was very surprised to find that after going to each site, I had a lot of trouble finding an artist I had never heard of, these were all the top 100 dj's in the world.

All these services (at least in electronic music) seem to largely ignore the long tail of music and those purveyors of it. Popular artists are great, but how do I find out about the new stars? MySpace seems to have figured out how to promote new artists, why can't these services? I absolutely love the feeling of listening to the latest and greatest, so someone should look into this service.

I think their is a wide open market for a social music service that recommends newly or semi popular artists and integrates them with popular artists. Granted a lot of the long tail sucks, but there must surely be at least one artist that's great and not huge but growing for each artist that is huge. Why isn't anyone doing this yet?

Comments

[Marc]

Hi,
I like your idea a lot and we are actually working on that model....check out www.samurai.fm and let me know what you think.

Marc

[Ryan Stewart]

Thanks Jimmy, are you coming to Ignite Seattle?

[Gideon Marken]

Hi - I read your comments at TechCruch and your post here and I wanted to point you towards some great electronic music :)

http://www.artistserver.com

I'm the owner/founder - the site was originally lauched 5yrs ago, with a focus on electronic music. Then in 2005, I opened the site up to all genres and changed the name from ElectronicScene.com to ArtistServer.com - there's 19,000+ registered users, 6,500+ mp3 hosted - and the vast majority are electronic!

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QUOTE: " think their is a wide open market for a social music service that recommends newly or semi popular artists and integrates them with popular artists"

I've been working on this. I grabbed the data from MusicBrainz - imported it into a different database, and later this year will roll out a new feature I'm calling "Artist Tags." It's the same as using 'tags' - except in this case, the tags are Artist/Band names.

This mimics the current behavior of music reccomendation - which tends to go like this: "Have you head of NewBandName? They sound like ThisBand and ThatBand but they rock harder and the singer..."

Once songs and artists on ArtistServer have Artist Tags, it will allow people to browse by music they already enjoy, to discover new music that they might like.

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You can contact me through ArtistServer - let me know what kind of electronic music you are into, I can suggest some artists to check out on ArtistServer. I'm also an artist on the site ;) http://www.artistserver.com/sonicwallpaper

Looks like your blog covers topics I'm into - so I'm subscribing - have a good one!

(and Ryan... if you are still here... ArtistServer is all ColdFusion baby!)

- Gideon

[twentysomething]

I will absolutely be at Ignite!

[Rob Roberts]

Jimmy,

You may also want to check out OurStage.com. Our mission is to help discover up-and-coming bands using the voice of the fans. More to come.

-Rob