Problems and solutions (?)

So my previous post discussed the primary problem for listeners and musicians in this age of easy, cheap music recordings and everything internet:

Listeners: finding the right song

Artists: finding the right listeners

I glossed over how companies have approached solving this problem, but will address some of that here. There have been a lot of solutions, far more than I would want to get into on this post. Pandora may be the most logical and elegant so far - use known music to find new. It also lends itself to emerging artists something like 70%, but only 60,000 artists are present in the database and it is internet radio (which I'm not fond of). That said, it certainly has done well - an average of 2.3MM unqiue views per month according to Compete. Last.fm has also done well, albeit by using genre and social networking groups (average of 1.8MM unique visitors). (I'm not sure what percent of music on Last.fm is independent. Anyone know?)

These two sites have really caught people's attention and they should be proud of that (graph to the right), but they are not alone by any means. There are others out there trying to solve these problems too. Owl Multimedia is a really cool idea, but I'm honestly not yet convinced it works - it hasn't worked for me...yet. It also appears that I may not be the only one to think this, because so far it hasn't caught on (3,222 average unique visitors/month) according to Compete.

Then there are the hosting sites for independent artists. Of those that I've looked at Reverbnation does slightly better than Virb according to Compete (220K vs. 169K unique visitors/month average). Fuzz comes in a distant third with 11.7K.

The disparity in these numbers (successful modestly indpendent music search sites (Pandora) vs. mostly independent music hosting sites (Reverbnation, etc.) speaks volumes I think. It indicates that I'm not alone when I become frustrated scouring the sites for songs as a listener. When using Reverbnation, Virb, or Fuzz one resorts to the typical formulas: genre, band location, newness, and that popularity contest that I hated in high school. As an artist, one does all that one can do to get noticed - cool names, cool pics, but ultimately can only hope that the right people find one's tune, and as a former colleague of mine often said, "Hope is not a strategy". Truth be told, I've got original tunes posted on all three of these sites, and I'm really hoping that these tunes get noticed. The odds are against getting noticed by the right people randomly though...and that brings us right back to where we were when we started - we still have the problems.