Tagging (-verb): Applying a word or phrase as a label or means of description.
Tagaholic (-noun): A person who gets more than cheap thrills from tagging.

As a self-professed tag-a-holic I’m pretty stoked about the news, and especially so because I had emailed them suggesting a tagging feature. Bandcamp artists can now list themselves in up to five genres, they can add their location, and they can add specific traits to individual tracks in the form of tags. Adding the genre and location isn’t that groundbreaking on its own (almost all music sites have this to some degree) but this feature is positioning Bandcamp towards an indie music discovery community. When you click on the tags/genres/locations you can see all the other artists or tracks tagged the same way. There’s not a set list of tags that you are confined too either—you can describe your music how you see fit. I’ve written before about how I think Bandcamp is the best way to represent an indie artist’s music online. I’ve already discovered some new artists by just browsing through the tags, and because the presentation is so ace, it just makes you want to press play.

Bandcamp’s Tag Cloud on Day 1. bandcamp.com/tag

Bandcamp seems to grasp the importance of maintaining their already-superb platform but it’s great to see they’re continuing to fine-tune and add new features. I think the addition of more community features on Bandcamp like commenting (or fan reviews) would be welcomed, and in case not, they could leave it up to each artist whether they want to allow commenting on their tracks via having an option in their artist settings. Comments or fan reviews under each track remind me of Amie Street’s Rec’s which IMO in my opinion is that site’s best and most engaging feature. There you have to download (buy) the track to recommend (review) it. Another potential community-driver could be digg-like voting. However it’d be smart for Bandcamp to take things one step at a time and be sure to continue to deliver its core features as a service for bands.

Community Overload?

There is an abundance of online music communities, but there’s not many sites that offer the high-quality DIY service that Bandcamp does, and there’s room for them to keep advancing there too. Last year they added sales of physical goods. I’d like to see them add embeddable mailing list sign-up widgets—they already collect emails with downloads for you so this seems like an easy feature extension that would make them more of an all-in-one service for musicians. Or they could somehow integrate with YouTube or Ustream to have video on the Bandcamp page/storefront/channel/station (or however you want to call it). What’s your take on these ideas? I don’t think I’d go as far as having listeners create profiles—who needs another profile, right? I’d try to find a way to let people interact through a service that lets them login with their existing online profiles. In yesterday’s blog post on the tagging, Bandcamp says they originally had “no desire to create another online music community.”

Because there are so many other music sites, one can see what works, what flops, and and try to understand why. I don’t know if any of you have followed the story about TheSixtyOne’s recent redesign. TheSixtyOne is an indie music community where “new artists make music and listeners decide what’s good.” Think indie radio + voting + discussion + digital store. Last month they did a major redesign of the site with no warning and upset a lot of their users. The new design is what I call euro-style and looks cool but the community features are less prevalent. I give them credit for trying something new but they should have communicated the upcoming changes better with their uses. If they did, they might have realized that their users care more about the community than flashy design.

It’s All About The Data

Bandcamp’s new tagging should go over well. It’s subtle but powerful. I even think everyone would benefit more if Bandcamp takes this one step further by enabling the users (listeners) to tag tracks. We’ve seen that crowdsourced-tagging approach before on other music sites—Last.fm and Amie Street come to mind—and it’s a fun way to create data that engages fans (because they have to think about your music as they tag). Tag. Tag. Tag. I’m a tagging freak. I don’t try to organize, I just tag. I tag in excess because it makes things easier to find later. See, I can’t even help but over-tag my blog posts (you’re supposed to use at most 10 tags). My Delicious bookmarks total 7000+ tags. I’m not alone either. Widely-used social bookmarking apps like Delicious, Xmarks, and Google Bookmarks hold the tag data created by thousands and thousands of users. Combine all that and you’ve got a helluva lot of data to crunch. It’s like using humans to crawl the web instead of search bots. Humans zone in on content and label it in a way that’s effective and meaningful for, well, humans. Delicious is essentially a crowdsourced search engine. They provide a great service but they’ve failed to innovate. They’re owned by Yahoo. They have the data, but they don’t leverage it in their apps.

Back to music—think about how Last.fm powers its similar artists based on listener behavior. Think about combining listener behavior with crowdsourced tagging could make recommendation engines. Multiple tag queries or basic seach operators would be great for filtering by genre and location simultaneously—e.g. electronica + new york—but I wouldn’t stop at genre and location—I’d try to encourage mood tags and sounds-like tags too. If Bandcamp collected tag data from everyone they could better use it analyze trends and could bring their upcoming search that they mention to a whole new level. I hope they attempt to deliver more in the way of music analytics and music intelligence.

Read more posts tagged Bandcamp here.

Social Rocks.

The stage is lit—music has always been social, and the web continues to make it even more so. Communication is on the rise. People want to share and “everyone who shares is an influencer.” Music discovery is powered by your friends and by recommendation engines—the technology is only getting smarter, and, in their case, everyone who listens is an influencer. Web apps like Blip.fm and Twisten.fm rely nearly entirely on friend-powered playlists and realtime recommendations. Music streamers crave sharing, simplicity, and depths of controls for customizing their listening experiences.

Shareability and community spin music in the social web. Pandora and Last.fm’s widely popular iPhone apps encourage users to share songs they like with their friends as they’re listening to them. Grooveshark’s web interface heavily encourages sharing, and its integration with Twitter via Twisten.fm and Tinysong have helped fuel its rapid growth in 2009. Nearly all of today’s free (ad-supported) streaming sites include links to purchase mp3′s via iTunes or Amazon. Vevo has them, but, YouTube—arguably the largest and most engaging music streaming site—does not.

The Delicious user base has a relatively high concentration of developers, designers, techies, nerds, etc.—individuals likely to have above-average internet savvy. As a group they are an acute filter for quality content. The chart below shows the popularity of the same music websites based on data from Delicious. You can see there is some divergence from the traffic heat map. The most notable difference is MySpace Music, which showed the highest website traffic, but shows the lowest Delicious rank. Pandora is the top-bookmarked music site on Delicious by far, with last.fm second, and Grooveshark climbing quickly. Pandora is also the top-ranked music site on Xmarks.

Musicians—many are at the center of the social mix lifecasting on Twitter, Ustream, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace. They’re communicating like never before, and evolving the industry. Revenue comes in new forms. The urge to be “indie” is contagious. The amplifiers are on.

Mobility Rolls.

Seven of the top twelve are radio/streaming apps. But smartphones are not just for listening to music. Gigzee is an events app—a location-aware tool for finding shows/concerts in your area. With more people on smartphones, more people can take advantage of location-based services like this. Music creation apps like Virtuoso Piano, Drum Kit, freestyle, NLog Synth, Digidrummer, Looptastic, and Jamble Music Mashups are wildly popular. Every human is an artist in some way—as technology improves more people will find themselves creating, and collaborating remotely. Who’s at center stage now? Creative Commons-released music encourages open remixing via sites like JamGlue, ccMixter, Indaba Music, Jamendo, SoundCloud, and more. Maybe influenced by NIN, many musicians are releasing audio source files for open remixing, fan remix contests, remix apps, or fan music videos.

Based on estimated traffic data from compete.com, this visualization compares November 2009 website visits for 27 popular, legal, music stream-or-download destinations. The heat map is to scale—larger map areas represent higher website traffic. Green indicates positive growth in 2009. Red indicates negative growth in 2009. Hold your mouse over each area for stats. Use Ctrl + to zoom.

Pandora is the radio powerhouse, but MySpace Music, disturbingly, has the highest traffic, and MySpace acquired both Imeem and iLike this year. iTunes is omitted here because it’s not web-based—yet—but clearly it is widely used. The top three percentage gainers were Grooveshark, Lala, and Spotify. Grooveshark has shown the most consistent growth throughout the year, and let me tell you I think it’s going to be a Jaws-like monster (especially when it goes mobile). It delivers free full-on cloud-based streaming and user uploads. Grooveshark’s iPhone app is pending Apple’s approval, but I wonder if Apple will be reluctant to approve it because it would be sharp competition with iTunes and their newly acquired Lala. It’s no surprise that Google was also looking to buy Lala—maybe they’ll turn to bite Grooveshark. Grooveshark’s minimalistic home page is even Google-esque, and there’s something to be said for simple design. Being curious as to mobile applications’ influence on website traffic, I listed available mobile apps with the sortable data below.

Tweets about Apple acquiring Lala have been flooding Twitter for 3+ days now. A number of sources have provided news and analysis on the acquisition. Personally I think Apple aims to move iTunes to the web in an effort to control mobile cloud-based music streaming via iPhones and iPods. Mobility is paramount, and I think that buying Lala was a sound move for Apple. By combining the best features of iTunes and Lala, Apple should be able to make a more seamless streaming experience with a simpler payment process—a simple payment process leads to more people buying. You can bet there will be an iPhone app that enables buying and simplifies the buying process.

Die-hard Lala users hope that Apple will keep Lala’s key features in tact, and many are looking forward to new feature possibilities. Hopefully with the help of its Lala’s developers, Apple will be able to build onto Lala’s platform making music more accessible. Lala enables users to upload mp3′s from their computer so they can access them from anywhere through their Lala account. In Lala’s words, “Play it anywhere on the web. Most of your music will be matched to Lala’s catalog [and] any remaining unmatched MP3s can be uploaded to Lala.”

A massive user-submitted music library is being built in the cloud. What I’d really like to see is for everyone’s uploads to be available to everyone, much like they are in Grooveshark—a free music streaming service that lets users upload tracks to the cloud. Let’s compare their relative popularity with other some streaming/download services—Spotify, MOG, and Amie Street—in the graph below:

What’s worth noting about MOG having the most visitors is that MOG markets itself more as a social network—their tagline is “Discover People Through Music and Music Through People.” Having social features clearly plays a big role in web-based music discovery—it’s social music discovery. Extended stats and analysis are to follow in Part 2 later this week.

• Photo: Lala Apple Logo Mashup by VirtualMusictv/Flickr
• View Lala screenshots.

Listeners: There is music that you can download for free—legally or illegally—and there is music that you can stream for free. The trend is towards streaming. I support bands that are giving their tracks away for free. I’ll even admit it—I’m offended when bands expect me to pay for an mp3 download. Am I completely off base here, or do you agree?

Unlike these records, mp3′s can be easily duplicated and shared for free. We are in a new time and we need new rules. Welcome to the digital revolution.

Bands: Giving downloads away for free is an excellent promotional move. It puts out the message that you care about your fans, and that you want them to hear your music. It is a leader into other revenue streams. I recommend collecting fans’ email addresses in exchange for free downloads. This can be achieved nicely by Bandcamp, which, in my opinion is a super-slick service. Bandcamp enables downloads in multiple hi-res formats, and the platform encourages sharing on social networks. They even offer pay-what-you-want pricing options—the only drawback is that PayPal takes a percentage. [Demo: My Bandcamp Page]

I hope paid download services shift their business models to make the music more “free” for listeners. I think services could generate ad revenue that the artists could share in—in such a way that bands could choose the ads on their pages as to match the right advertisements with the music. I recently commented about Amie Street implementing this idea, but imagine if a mega-service like iTunes could work magic like that.

Friend recommendations seem to be the hottest source—whether they are in person, on the phone, or through the web. We discover music through sharing in mainstream social networks—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace—and also through music-specific social networks like Last.fm, Imeem, Grooveshark, TheSixtyOne, and Blip.fm. Mainstream networks are broadening their music capabilities, and music applications within them are going to be pretty huge. Smaller music sites that may not survive on their own might do better as Facebook, Twitter, or smartphone applications. The latest, big-name buzz has been about MySpace’s iLike purchase, Spotify—whose potential entrance to the U.S. may be through Facebook’s doors—and Grooveshark, whose iPhone application may be arriving in the future. Imeem—which started as a social network—made a complete shift into the social music service that it is today. YouTube is a major discovery source and video links are widely shared via email, IM, and Facebook. Ustream.tv is live video platform that can be used to discover music through live interaction—a crucial feature that I emphasized in my debut VirtualMusic.tv forecast.

Before one can recommend music to their friends, they have to discover it themselves first. They are, say, early adopters. This initial discovery is increasingly enabled by open, social, music discovery sites (see the clickable link cloud above) and through integration of their applications with the existing mainstream networks I mentioned above. This integration from site to site is a key usability factor that facilitates sharing and alleviates the need for users to ‘sign up’ for a million sites. For example Twisten.FM is a nice Twitter–Grooveshark blend that lets me hear a playlist made from the people I follow on Twitter, and there are a number of other applications built for sharing music on Twitter alone. The speed that information is shared on Twitter is awesome, and I often discover new artists through Twitter convo. Open remixing applications like Indaba Music are another up-and-coming source of discovery. The others ways exposed in our brainstorm include movies, live shows, videogames, bittorrent and p2p file-sharing, fan-funding sites (more about these in an upcoming article), magazine articles, blog posts—including mp3blog posts via aggregation sites like elbo.ws—and all types of radio—traditional, satellite, and web-based. We’ve seen a definite shift away from download sites and towards streaming sites. But what did we miss? How/where do you discover music? Please give us your say below.

• How Do You Discover Music? by VirtualMusictv//Flickr
• Music Discovery Link Cloud by VirtualMusictv/Flickr

Read more posts tagged Music Discovery here.