The real success here is Soundcloud. It's venerated by fans of underground electronic music, mainly due to its simple and effective social features.
It's very much like twitter for music in its social functionality. Once you've hunted out the profiles of your favourite artists and labels, logging onto its dashboard becomes a looked-forward-to treat, because you know that soundcloud is where artists put their tunes first, often before they're even finished.
It's basically taken over the actual use case that made myspace successful rather than the one they tried to monetise, which is a place for artists to interact with each other and for fans to go and listen to a snapshot of their current output. The difference is they have implemented it in a way that doesn't make you want to alternately scream/cry when using it.
Their genius is in not trying to get the public to use it. The interface is entirely aimed at artists. If you sign up and you don't have any music to upload, it says "zero tracks" under your name everywhere and you look like a loser. If you don't have at least some experience with music in a non listening capacity, then the whole interface is probably baffling.
This is a great move: it keeps out the general public who are never going to pay for the premium accounts, and it allows Soundcloud to concentrate on pushing the platform/api side of things, which is rightly what they are focusing on for the future.
The real question is, why have I written all that blurb about soundcloud in a thread about FB/spotify?
It's very much like twitter for music in its social functionality. Once you've hunted out the profiles of your favourite artists and labels, logging onto its dashboard becomes a looked-forward-to treat, because you know that soundcloud is where artists put their tunes first, often before they're even finished.
It's basically taken over the actual use case that made myspace successful rather than the one they tried to monetise, which is a place for artists to interact with each other and for fans to go and listen to a snapshot of their current output. The difference is they have implemented it in a way that doesn't make you want to alternately scream/cry when using it.
Their genius is in not trying to get the public to use it. The interface is entirely aimed at artists. If you sign up and you don't have any music to upload, it says "zero tracks" under your name everywhere and you look like a loser. If you don't have at least some experience with music in a non listening capacity, then the whole interface is probably baffling.
This is a great move: it keeps out the general public who are never going to pay for the premium accounts, and it allows Soundcloud to concentrate on pushing the platform/api side of things, which is rightly what they are focusing on for the future.
The real question is, why have I written all that blurb about soundcloud in a thread about FB/spotify?