Internet for musicians and lovers of exclusive: an overview of the possibilities
Nowadays, everyone has taken the fashion to shout that they provide some exclusive opportunities. As a result, the opposite is true: it has become very difficult to navigate a huge number of music sites, especially when it’s not about the portals where you can download tracks for free. For musicians by vocation, such as ours (well-known in narrow circles :) band, you should consider proposals to unwind, post your tracks or home-made videos. And all this is free, luring us with the hope that someone will see the creatures, check out and sign a million contract. No less - offers to listen to the unique creativity of the same as we, little-known ensembles and talented nuggets. But how to understand these sweet promises in Mont Blanc, how to find something that really helps you, how to break through the paling of factory-like ensembles on TV and radio?
To answer these questions, we had to shovel the expanses of the World Wide Web and recommend both already popular and simply interesting, in our opinion, resources. Below is a subjective review of the sites, which give authors and music lovers the opportunity to search for new music, promote their own creativity, as well as monetization and search for producers. The review includes both Russian-language and international portals of the musical sphere of the World Wide Web.
1) Last.fm. Perhaps the most famous online music project, the main service of which is the collection of information about the music listened by the user, and its cataloging in the individual and general charts. A typical feature of the site is its recommendatory nature: based on the analysis of listening statistics, users of the site individually select and show music tracks recommended by the site for listening, similar in taste to listeners; personal pages of participants with similar tastes, as well as records of frequently listened to user music in the forum or personal blogs, conducted directly on the website Last.fm. A distinctive feature of the portal is such a convenient service as geo-targeting: when selecting announcements for the nearest concerts for users, not only musical tastes are taken into account, but also the geographical position of the listener. However, in the past few years, a change in the service policy towards monetization led to a reduction in the amount of free functionality, in particular, instead of the “full track” function, it became possible to listen to only 30-second previews.
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2) MySpace.com. This site, being a popular international social network and the largest blogging platform, provides users with the ability to create communities of interest, personal profiles, blogging, posting photos, video and music content. Profiles on the site allow users to upload their own discographies of music tracks to the portal, provided they have rights to these works: his personal works, issued permissions for posting, etc. Users can also use the service for the sale of tracks - Snocap, which has gained popularity among the audience of MySpace. One of the drawbacks of the portal is, oddly enough, the possibility of self-styling of pages - the output is a colorful and chaotic cluster of music groups with limited personal settings: the order of songs, the display of comments, the number of displayed friends. In addition, you can highlight the general limitations of statistics on MySpace: The number of plays of a song, the number of profile views, the number of video views. Everything. Without details. So the quality of the information provided, if, of course, your goal is to analyze the popularity of creativity, does not reach good ratings.
3) RealMusic.ru . Music hosting for both famous performers and unknown musicians, where everyone can create their profile with a photo gallery, place music in MP3 format. Hosting RealMusic has no restrictions on the number of files to be hosted, which ultimately led to the formation of a huge base of musicians. In addition to the fact that the site can download mp3 music for free and legally, users have the opportunity to leave an opinion about the tracks in the form of comments. In addition, the site provides detailed statistics by day: for example, which track listened to how many times, what volume was downloaded on which days - information that is quite useful, especially for beginning musicians. Among the shortcomings of the service can be identified too many music groups does not allow you to easily find really high-quality music. In addition, the site does not position itself as a producer center, does not engage in "promotion" of musical projects and the sale of musical works. The task of the site is to give musicians additional opportunities using the Internet to make themselves known. In order to promote and popularize musicians, RealMusic holds contests involving various interested organizations, such as studios and production centers. In the end, however, this does not guarantee that you will be noticed due to the above-mentioned shortcomings of the portal. In addition, the site is designed for a Russian-speaking audience, which limits the possibility of being noticed by world lovers of new music.
4) LoudCloud.fm is a platform for bringing together beginner and professional musicians, their fans and producers. On the site, you can listen and comment on songs, albums, groups, melodies, invite performers, find new friends, watch video clips of your favorite groups and much more. However, it’s still not possible to download music from albums with albums, only as individual tracks. It’s also not clear how artists meet producers and recording studios, what mechanisms allow musicians to raise their level of popularity and become noticed. The acquaintance with the new music comes from the announcements posted by users directly on the site and offering to listen, evaluate and donate any amount of money to the team they like.
5) EggTop.com . The most interesting, in our opinion, young project. The portal has the character of an advisory service, is a social network and positions itself as the first online producer for talented people. Today, this is the first project where a mechanism for a paid assessment of copyright content is implemented, which today is needed by millions of creative people. Users are divided into Authors, Experts and Guests, in accordance with the role they are assigned certain opportunities. The site provides Authors with the possibility of virtual automatic advancement and popularization of author's content by sending tracks to a vote, and to Experts of making money online by evaluating music. There is a system of exchange of views on the tracks, as well as the possibility of targeting - splitting into target segments of the surveyed audience. In addition, one of the features of the project is that it has a Russian version, which is very important for many Russian users, but at the same time it is designed for an international audience. The launch of additional services was also announced - online concerts, as well as EggTop.FM radio and EggTop.MN online magazine. Realizing the mechanism of online registration of copyright, EggTop becomes a series of few “projects created specifically for users”, unlike many others, “created for monetization”. Although, undoubtedly, the creators of the portal also did not forget their benefits ;-).
6) MOG is a social network, a blogging platform, where users who listen to music mostly from their personal computers, or from smartphones, can create their own personal pages, indicating musical interests and the history of listening to tracks. Unlike Last.fm, the service allows you to upload playlists from the user's music collection to a page in MOG, and then keeps track of what music the user is listening to on his computer. Other advantages of the portal are the presence of music-oriented blogs on the site, detailed tags by genres, as well as integration with iTunes and Amazon to facilitate the purchase of music albums.
7) MusoCity . Musical social network, which is based on the concept of connection and interaction between fans, musicians, performers, event organizers and retailers. After registration, the user can start searching for people with similar musical interests, new musical performers. The service is also built on the principle of geo-targeting: users can find and communicate with people living nearby, create musical groups, as well as pick up events in which to participate.
8) iJigg is a music community that allows users to post opinions about tracks and share songs. The site assumes that user activity is aimed at voting for music content and, thereby, users themselves can influence the popularity of certain compositions. Musicians can also upload their tracks to the site and share them with the community in order to find new fans, for this purpose, it is supposed to choose an account of either the Listener or the Contractor, which, in turn, will expand the user experience. For example, Listeners can download mp3s of their favorite artists for free, while Artists can upload their music. However, the ability to download music for free is no longer unique to most users, there is no system for exchanging opinions, and the rating system among a large number of groups does not guarantee the performer immediate popularity.
9) Flotones is a musical social network with a monetization function for performers and their fans. The main idea of ​​the site is the interaction between musicians and music lovers. Among the distinctive features of this site, you can highlight the possibility of promoting and distributing copyright content using mobile phones using ringtones and screensavers. After registering and adding content, users can promote their mobile content on the site; Integration with MySpace also allows you to increase the popularity of copyright content on this site, in the profile of the artist, group.
10) Midomi is another social network to facilitate the search for new music for Internet users, the advantage of which is the ability to search for a track using a special service: the user can simply sing or speak an excerpt from the song. All that may be needed is a microphone. This way, you search for music of interest, as well as people who share user tastes. In addition, the site allows you to listen and vote for singers, view photos, send messages, chat, and buy music. Promotion of musicians on the site is not supposed, there are no statistics for performers to assess the popularity of their work.
11) The concept of the Sellaband project at the first time of its existence was evaluated very inconsistently, but in the end it turned out to be a rather popular and visited service, which is currently very well developed. The idea of ​​the site is financial support from fans and listeners of their favorite musical performers, in such a way that users become a kind of “producer” for their favorite authors, giving them the chance to earn money to record an album. According to the concept of the site, investors receive a small share of the profits, and performers have the opportunity to both record their music and receive up to half of the advertising revenue from downloading their music.
12) Jamendo is a music platform and community with the following features: music is distributed under various licenses, it is possible to download music albums. The site has a built-in recommender system, tags and reviews that allow discovering new musical talents, as well as, in the previous case, a system of voluntary donations to musicians through PayPal, with part of the proceeds going to content authors — up to 50% of advertising and almost 100% donations from Jamendo site visitors.
13) Reverbnation - a social network designed to help users find new music, and performers - fans and music events to participate. The site provides a widget that allows participants to post content on web pages and promote it online. A feature of the site is the Band Equity service, which measures popularity based on 4 indicators, namely: accessibility, impact, number of points and novelty. Based on these indicators, performers are recorded in the top 100 of each musical genre.
14) Haystack is another social network dedicated to music and allowing participants to search the site and create playlists, and also makes it easier for fans and musicians to find each other, share music, video, photos and view new content. The service is also advisory in nature because it takes into account tastes based on information from user profiles, which can be downloaded, for example, from YouTube. Artists can register themselves or as a band.
15) iLike is a community based on the selection of music users, based on their preferences, searching for people by musical interests. In addition, the service is designed to help “streamline” the musical preferences of users, to find new groups and artists recommended by friends. The statistics of listening on the site provides information about what music is most popular now among the user's friends, and also shows how compatible his tastes are with the preferences of friends. In addition, the service sends recommendations to the user directly in iTunes.
16) Sonific is positioning itself as a service to promote music. The site interface consists of two main parts: the first allows performers to place free music widgets with the author's music on the site and spin the tracks among the audience; on the other hand, participants can listen to this music for free, wherever they put it: on a blog, a profile on a social network or on another site. One of the main drawbacks is the impossibility of free direct download music.
17) Blip.fm - the Internet service that appeared not so long ago and operates according to the following principle: the participants subscribe to listening to interesting streams and add each other as friends; There is an opportunity to promote DJs for your favorite posts by raising rating points. Among the features of the site, it is possible to single out the possibility of not only leaving a mini-post, but also supplying the message with a musical composition. Thus, each participant blip.fm seems not to be a blogger, but a DJ of his own musical flow, which pleases friends with musical tastes and wit.
18) Radio 2.0 from Mercora, being a social network, offers the possibility of integrated listening to music, based on contextual music-oriented advertising, as well as on a personal list of auditions from a personal computer. The latter is implemented by scanning users' hard disk for legally downloaded tracks, then participants can show their music library to the whole world. One of the peculiarities is that each radio station has different broadcasting channels and each performer has a chance to show their tracks in the form of a playlist on a global scale.
19) More friendly than a website, more interactive than a blog, the community platform Buzznet allows users to share their favorite content, including music, based on their own interests. Currently unites over 6 million users. Unlike other networks focused on links between user pages and profiles, project participants communicate in communities created around specific thematic events, ideas, interests, mainly music. The popularity of a community is determined by the amount of “noise” it receives. Each track, photo, video can receive a certain amount of "noise" from other participants, in turn, community leaders and voting leaders are displayed on the site in tops.
20) Mp3ritm.com - a portal that positions itself as an advisory service in the world of music, is Russian-speaking and provides participants with the opportunity to share their favorite music with site visitors, if, of course, it is not yet flooded with other participants, evaluate audio tracks laid out by other participants download music for free. The service does not involve the promotion of unknown groups, but helps users navigate the world of music, and also displays top-end songs in the rotation of their own radio.
And finally, I would like to wish the authors, beginners and not so much, to be more active in promoting their creativity, look for more opportunities, and appreciate their “spark”.Do not forget about copyright protection for your works - the costs will be rewarded. Go to your heights, experiment, become famous, and never forget to help the same beginners as you once were. See you live!
To answer these questions, we had to shovel the expanses of the World Wide Web and recommend both already popular and simply interesting, in our opinion, resources. Below is a subjective review of the sites, which give authors and music lovers the opportunity to search for new music, promote their own creativity, as well as monetization and search for producers. The review includes both Russian-language and international portals of the musical sphere of the World Wide Web.
1) Last.fm. Perhaps the most famous online music project, the main service of which is the collection of information about the music listened by the user, and its cataloging in the individual and general charts. A typical feature of the site is its recommendatory nature: based on the analysis of listening statistics, users of the site individually select and show music tracks recommended by the site for listening, similar in taste to listeners; personal pages of participants with similar tastes, as well as records of frequently listened to user music in the forum or personal blogs, conducted directly on the website Last.fm. A distinctive feature of the portal is such a convenient service as geo-targeting: when selecting announcements for the nearest concerts for users, not only musical tastes are taken into account, but also the geographical position of the listener. However, in the past few years, a change in the service policy towards monetization led to a reduction in the amount of free functionality, in particular, instead of the “full track” function, it became possible to listen to only 30-second previews.
')
2) MySpace.com. This site, being a popular international social network and the largest blogging platform, provides users with the ability to create communities of interest, personal profiles, blogging, posting photos, video and music content. Profiles on the site allow users to upload their own discographies of music tracks to the portal, provided they have rights to these works: his personal works, issued permissions for posting, etc. Users can also use the service for the sale of tracks - Snocap, which has gained popularity among the audience of MySpace. One of the drawbacks of the portal is, oddly enough, the possibility of self-styling of pages - the output is a colorful and chaotic cluster of music groups with limited personal settings: the order of songs, the display of comments, the number of displayed friends. In addition, you can highlight the general limitations of statistics on MySpace: The number of plays of a song, the number of profile views, the number of video views. Everything. Without details. So the quality of the information provided, if, of course, your goal is to analyze the popularity of creativity, does not reach good ratings.
3) RealMusic.ru . Music hosting for both famous performers and unknown musicians, where everyone can create their profile with a photo gallery, place music in MP3 format. Hosting RealMusic has no restrictions on the number of files to be hosted, which ultimately led to the formation of a huge base of musicians. In addition to the fact that the site can download mp3 music for free and legally, users have the opportunity to leave an opinion about the tracks in the form of comments. In addition, the site provides detailed statistics by day: for example, which track listened to how many times, what volume was downloaded on which days - information that is quite useful, especially for beginning musicians. Among the shortcomings of the service can be identified too many music groups does not allow you to easily find really high-quality music. In addition, the site does not position itself as a producer center, does not engage in "promotion" of musical projects and the sale of musical works. The task of the site is to give musicians additional opportunities using the Internet to make themselves known. In order to promote and popularize musicians, RealMusic holds contests involving various interested organizations, such as studios and production centers. In the end, however, this does not guarantee that you will be noticed due to the above-mentioned shortcomings of the portal. In addition, the site is designed for a Russian-speaking audience, which limits the possibility of being noticed by world lovers of new music.
4) LoudCloud.fm is a platform for bringing together beginner and professional musicians, their fans and producers. On the site, you can listen and comment on songs, albums, groups, melodies, invite performers, find new friends, watch video clips of your favorite groups and much more. However, it’s still not possible to download music from albums with albums, only as individual tracks. It’s also not clear how artists meet producers and recording studios, what mechanisms allow musicians to raise their level of popularity and become noticed. The acquaintance with the new music comes from the announcements posted by users directly on the site and offering to listen, evaluate and donate any amount of money to the team they like.
5) EggTop.com . The most interesting, in our opinion, young project. The portal has the character of an advisory service, is a social network and positions itself as the first online producer for talented people. Today, this is the first project where a mechanism for a paid assessment of copyright content is implemented, which today is needed by millions of creative people. Users are divided into Authors, Experts and Guests, in accordance with the role they are assigned certain opportunities. The site provides Authors with the possibility of virtual automatic advancement and popularization of author's content by sending tracks to a vote, and to Experts of making money online by evaluating music. There is a system of exchange of views on the tracks, as well as the possibility of targeting - splitting into target segments of the surveyed audience. In addition, one of the features of the project is that it has a Russian version, which is very important for many Russian users, but at the same time it is designed for an international audience. The launch of additional services was also announced - online concerts, as well as EggTop.FM radio and EggTop.MN online magazine. Realizing the mechanism of online registration of copyright, EggTop becomes a series of few “projects created specifically for users”, unlike many others, “created for monetization”. Although, undoubtedly, the creators of the portal also did not forget their benefits ;-).
6) MOG is a social network, a blogging platform, where users who listen to music mostly from their personal computers, or from smartphones, can create their own personal pages, indicating musical interests and the history of listening to tracks. Unlike Last.fm, the service allows you to upload playlists from the user's music collection to a page in MOG, and then keeps track of what music the user is listening to on his computer. Other advantages of the portal are the presence of music-oriented blogs on the site, detailed tags by genres, as well as integration with iTunes and Amazon to facilitate the purchase of music albums.
7) MusoCity . Musical social network, which is based on the concept of connection and interaction between fans, musicians, performers, event organizers and retailers. After registration, the user can start searching for people with similar musical interests, new musical performers. The service is also built on the principle of geo-targeting: users can find and communicate with people living nearby, create musical groups, as well as pick up events in which to participate.
8) iJigg is a music community that allows users to post opinions about tracks and share songs. The site assumes that user activity is aimed at voting for music content and, thereby, users themselves can influence the popularity of certain compositions. Musicians can also upload their tracks to the site and share them with the community in order to find new fans, for this purpose, it is supposed to choose an account of either the Listener or the Contractor, which, in turn, will expand the user experience. For example, Listeners can download mp3s of their favorite artists for free, while Artists can upload their music. However, the ability to download music for free is no longer unique to most users, there is no system for exchanging opinions, and the rating system among a large number of groups does not guarantee the performer immediate popularity.
9) Flotones is a musical social network with a monetization function for performers and their fans. The main idea of ​​the site is the interaction between musicians and music lovers. Among the distinctive features of this site, you can highlight the possibility of promoting and distributing copyright content using mobile phones using ringtones and screensavers. After registering and adding content, users can promote their mobile content on the site; Integration with MySpace also allows you to increase the popularity of copyright content on this site, in the profile of the artist, group.
10) Midomi is another social network to facilitate the search for new music for Internet users, the advantage of which is the ability to search for a track using a special service: the user can simply sing or speak an excerpt from the song. All that may be needed is a microphone. This way, you search for music of interest, as well as people who share user tastes. In addition, the site allows you to listen and vote for singers, view photos, send messages, chat, and buy music. Promotion of musicians on the site is not supposed, there are no statistics for performers to assess the popularity of their work.
11) The concept of the Sellaband project at the first time of its existence was evaluated very inconsistently, but in the end it turned out to be a rather popular and visited service, which is currently very well developed. The idea of ​​the site is financial support from fans and listeners of their favorite musical performers, in such a way that users become a kind of “producer” for their favorite authors, giving them the chance to earn money to record an album. According to the concept of the site, investors receive a small share of the profits, and performers have the opportunity to both record their music and receive up to half of the advertising revenue from downloading their music.
12) Jamendo is a music platform and community with the following features: music is distributed under various licenses, it is possible to download music albums. The site has a built-in recommender system, tags and reviews that allow discovering new musical talents, as well as, in the previous case, a system of voluntary donations to musicians through PayPal, with part of the proceeds going to content authors — up to 50% of advertising and almost 100% donations from Jamendo site visitors.
13) Reverbnation - a social network designed to help users find new music, and performers - fans and music events to participate. The site provides a widget that allows participants to post content on web pages and promote it online. A feature of the site is the Band Equity service, which measures popularity based on 4 indicators, namely: accessibility, impact, number of points and novelty. Based on these indicators, performers are recorded in the top 100 of each musical genre.
14) Haystack is another social network dedicated to music and allowing participants to search the site and create playlists, and also makes it easier for fans and musicians to find each other, share music, video, photos and view new content. The service is also advisory in nature because it takes into account tastes based on information from user profiles, which can be downloaded, for example, from YouTube. Artists can register themselves or as a band.
15) iLike is a community based on the selection of music users, based on their preferences, searching for people by musical interests. In addition, the service is designed to help “streamline” the musical preferences of users, to find new groups and artists recommended by friends. The statistics of listening on the site provides information about what music is most popular now among the user's friends, and also shows how compatible his tastes are with the preferences of friends. In addition, the service sends recommendations to the user directly in iTunes.
16) Sonific is positioning itself as a service to promote music. The site interface consists of two main parts: the first allows performers to place free music widgets with the author's music on the site and spin the tracks among the audience; on the other hand, participants can listen to this music for free, wherever they put it: on a blog, a profile on a social network or on another site. One of the main drawbacks is the impossibility of free direct download music.
17) Blip.fm - the Internet service that appeared not so long ago and operates according to the following principle: the participants subscribe to listening to interesting streams and add each other as friends; There is an opportunity to promote DJs for your favorite posts by raising rating points. Among the features of the site, it is possible to single out the possibility of not only leaving a mini-post, but also supplying the message with a musical composition. Thus, each participant blip.fm seems not to be a blogger, but a DJ of his own musical flow, which pleases friends with musical tastes and wit.
18) Radio 2.0 from Mercora, being a social network, offers the possibility of integrated listening to music, based on contextual music-oriented advertising, as well as on a personal list of auditions from a personal computer. The latter is implemented by scanning users' hard disk for legally downloaded tracks, then participants can show their music library to the whole world. One of the peculiarities is that each radio station has different broadcasting channels and each performer has a chance to show their tracks in the form of a playlist on a global scale.
19) More friendly than a website, more interactive than a blog, the community platform Buzznet allows users to share their favorite content, including music, based on their own interests. Currently unites over 6 million users. Unlike other networks focused on links between user pages and profiles, project participants communicate in communities created around specific thematic events, ideas, interests, mainly music. The popularity of a community is determined by the amount of “noise” it receives. Each track, photo, video can receive a certain amount of "noise" from other participants, in turn, community leaders and voting leaders are displayed on the site in tops.
20) Mp3ritm.com - a portal that positions itself as an advisory service in the world of music, is Russian-speaking and provides participants with the opportunity to share their favorite music with site visitors, if, of course, it is not yet flooded with other participants, evaluate audio tracks laid out by other participants download music for free. The service does not involve the promotion of unknown groups, but helps users navigate the world of music, and also displays top-end songs in the rotation of their own radio.
And finally, I would like to wish the authors, beginners and not so much, to be more active in promoting their creativity, look for more opportunities, and appreciate their “spark”.Do not forget about copyright protection for your works - the costs will be rewarded. Go to your heights, experiment, become famous, and never forget to help the same beginners as you once were. See you live!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/100295/
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