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.

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.

The first place I turn when looking up artists has been Google or YouTube. When I’m not clicking on the YouTube video links in Google, I’m clicking on the Wikipedia entries. Having streamable tracks in the search results gives us an even faster way to hear the music, and the video results still show in Google as well. I’m surprised that they didn’t include a YouTube link next to the Rhapsody, Pandora, Imeem, Lala links in the new music results. But maybe there is a legal issue there? Nah, couldn’t be.

I think that the benefits brought by Google Music Search are only beginning and many more features are on the horizon. What features do you think would be most useful and entertaining? What new data will be gathered by this and how could it be used for the greater good? Recent coverage on Mashable predicted that Google Music Search will decrease iTunes’ market share, help keep MySpace in the game, and make Google a source of music trend information. Google continues to grow as a major force on the web and its stock price has been rocking a strong upward trend through 2009. What implications does Google’s increasing dominance have for music in the years to come?

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

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