Posts Tagged ‘Music Think Tank’
Short takes — The changing face of social media (2)
Image via CrunchBase
The much-hyped inevitable demise of MySpace may not be the done deal that many commentators are presuming. MySpace has carved out a niche for musicians that may not be easily replaced. Contradicting much of what has been written on the site lately, Bruce Houghton of Hypebot offers 6 Reasons Not To Quit MySpace:
1. Eyeballs
Nearly 60 million unique visitors viewed 500 million pages on MySpace last month. Those numbers may be smaller than a year ago, but they are are still significant. And I don’t buy the argument that most of them are other musicians.
2. Search Rank
Search for most bands and MySpace will usually appear as one of the top 5 results. Can you afford to have fans click on that link and find a dead or out of date MySpace page?
3. MySpace Is Still Mostly About Music
There are some good music add-ons for Facebook, but MySpace is still about music at its core. A place about music attracts fans and bands should want to be where fans are.
4. It’s Easy
MySpace not be pretty, but it is easy. Services like Hoote Sutie to Sonicbid’s ArtistData make it simple to keep multiple social networks up to date simultaneously.
5. If Other’s Aren’t There…
Be a contrarian. If some artists are quiting MySpace or leaving pages unattended, that decreases the competition for those 60 million pairs of eyes.
6. The Makeover
MySpace is in the middle of a major makeover. I’m as skeptical as you are that it won’t help. (Check out their absurd new logo). But is it smart to delete your account before we find out?
And David Harrell of Music Think Tank offers a nuts-and-bolts analysis of #2 — why MySpace has and will probably maintain its high search result rank for music acts: MySpace Still Rules Google Search Results for Music Acts
- ‘New MySpace’ takes cue from MTV (theglobeandmail.com)
- Steve Rosenbaum: MySpace is Reborn as Social Curation (huffingtonpost.com)
- MySpace Abandons Social Networking (socialtimes.com)
- MySpace Launches Massive Overhaul (dailyfinance.com)
- MySpace Admits Defeat, Goes Niche (businesspundit.com)
- 6 Lessons Learned From the Demise of MySpace (convinceandconvert.com)
- The MySpace redesign: Voice of a generation – or dressed up to sell? (guardian.co.uk)
Thinking about Research — Short Takes (2)
The paradoxes of choice overload — another installment of Kyle Bylin’s series on the paradoxes of choice overload of cultural products (on Music Think Tank). The article uses the I-Pod as an example and applies choice theory to the analysis and how the I-Pod can make “maximizers” miserable and turn “optimicizers” into maximizers. [A short excerpt below]
Savor Your Music: The Effect of Abundance in Culture
III. Overloaded With Choice
As you might guess, fans who exhibit the tendency to maximize their music experiences are also those who are the most susceptible to the paradoxes of choice overload. When a fan is overwhelmed by the number of songs on their iPod; it will be easier for them to regret a choice if the alternatives are plentiful than if they were scarce, especially if the alternatives are so plentiful that not all of them could be investigated. This makes it easy for them to imagine that they could’ve made a different choice that would’ve been better. All the imagined alternatives then, induce the fan to regret the decision they made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction they get out of the decision they made, even if it was agood song. It is, however, not the best song. To consider the attractiveness of the alternative songs that they rejected causes them to become less satisfied with the one they’ve chosen, leading them to keep scrolling through their iPod. The more songs they consider, these missed opportunities add up, and collectively diminish the amount of satisfaction they get out of the chosen alternative.
Deciphering Culture
Deciphering Culture 