Music Industry Getting Serious About Social Networking

For years it has been known that one place that combines music and social networking is MySpace - after all, music bands were here to connect to their fans and ensure distribution of their music while fans wanted to talk to their favorite bands and musicians here so MySpace rapidly grew as the most important place for music on the web. Of course there are some smaller sites that serve the same purpose but MySpace is certainly the best known and the most crowded one.

But now it looks like music labels have finally realized that their bands actually help MySpace generate profits and probably decided it would be better to get that profit to themselves. So we seem to see the first step in this direction with Warner Music intending to use Eos social networking platform by Cisco on its sites.

Cisco introduced Eos to the public at CES in Las Vegas as the platform primarily intended for media and entertainment companies. Eos represents a set of social networking tools that can be integrated into various music sites to bring more social feeling to them and let fans interact with their favorite artists right on their sites - on condition that the music labels decide to integrate Eos into those sites.

Warner Music is the first record label planning to adopt the Eos platform and move the sites of its artists to Eos during 2009. But the record’s plans are not to compete with social networks like MySpace - instead, these efforts are supposed to complement interaction of fans with their favorite artists with additional tools available directly on the sites. But of course it is obvious that there will be certain competition for eyeballs as fans will not be able to spend time both at MySpace and on the artist’s site at the same time so they will have to make some choices at some point of time depending on what is more important to them - music or their MySpace friends.

To me it already looks like an interesting trend: in late December Warner Music pulled all its content from YouTube after not managing to agree on a mutually-acceptable licensing deal with Google and now it also wants to keep fans on their own sites instead of communicating elsewhere: what if they finally realized those web communications generate money and they will be better off keeping it to themselves? If other record labels follow in this movement, many of the independent online players should now be concerned.

But the reasons to actually care about what’s going on on your own sites are pretty solid as according to Cisco market research as many as 36% of fans go directly to official sites of their favorite brands for content so it is logical that these sites could benefit from further enhancements like social networking tools. At the same time for now the interaction happens on social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook while it is only reasonable that combining content with social networking will mean more time spent on the sites and hopefully more sales as well which should be the final goal of the record label.

I believe that with a prominent company like Cisco paying attention to the music industry in particular and offering the industry players tools to add all those cool social networking features intended specifically for the media and entertainment industry we will see mass adoption finally - even despite of the fact that only few of them wanted to adopt various social networking tools that have been available from smaller providers for years now.