Music. Marketing. Social Media.

If you haven’t heard the news, MySpace has purchased iLike, the “most popular music service on Facebook” (according to their About page).

This makes a lot of sense, though it may cause some controversy.

MySpace has positioned itself as the entertainment-focused social network. You go there to listen to music, get show updates, view trailers, and interact with personalities, not necessarily friends.  Facebook, in comparison, is about primarily connecting with people you know (or knew), not brands.

Artists have been moving from MySpace to Facebook en masse lately, maintaining a profile on each site, but using them differently in many cases. Why? It relates back to the networks themselves…

MySpace, at it’s heart, is about a push model of social interaction.

Create page –> Find people who you think may be interested –> Add them as a friend –> Comment and share info about your music –> Repeat

Facebook is about a distinctly pull model of social interaction.

Create fan page (or group) –> People find you –> You post content that appears in their updates/on their wall –> They share on your behalf –> Repeat

iLike is a hybrid. The service itself is about the push, but artists can use it to spread their message and extend their virtual reach, enhancing their pull.

Strategically, the acquisition was a great move for MySpace for a few reasons.  Now it’s even easier to syndicate content across multiple social networks (important when your users “home” is a network that is NOT your own), and the buy helps MySpace strengthen their positioning as THE entertainment-focused social network.

With Radiohead recently hinting that they would be “unlikely to release another album conventionally” and Mos Def’s newest album released via t-shirt (yes, t-shirt), I can’t help but wonder what else we’ll see from artists in the coming months.

As a former musician and DJ, I’ve consumed all forms of music media through the years.  I still have the very first CD I bought (Cake’s Fashion Nugget, for the record), have an old boom box lurking somewhere in a forgotten closet corner with a stack of tapes to match, and still have a bit of vinyl around from my DJ’ing years.

However, in recent years I’ve found that online streaming media and downloaded music (mixes and “here, have this for free” music of the legal kind, mind you) have served my musical appetite very well, leaving me very few reasons to actually go and purchase music, digitally or otherwise.

According to Trent Reznor, ” music IS free whether you want to believe that or not”.  As a musician, I agree.

Recording music? Not free

Promoting your recordings? Not free

Traveling to play a show? Not free

Here is where the problem lies.  Due to Napster and the birth of the current music-sharing “free for all” (pun not intended), recorded music is considered free, leaving the “not free” costs of recording the tracks to be covered by other means.

Consumers have a voice and they’ve been speaking for a long time by not purchasing what they consider to be over-priced music.  Liner notes, cover art and the physical medium (these days, CD’s) aren’t considered to have as much value as they once carried, and due to the endless alternatives available for acquiring the actual music, CD profits are continuing to decline.

None of this is news.

What is news, is the fact that artists are taking things into their own hands and using a bit of creativity with the packaging of their music.  Mos Def’s t-shirt is a great example, and I’d like to see other artists pick up on the trend.  Thinking from a marketing perspective, I argue that this is more valuable than just selling a basic CD, as the consumers are now walking billboards, promoting his music wherever they go (on top of spending the same price, or more, that they would have paid for the actual CD).

So what about vinyl? “Dead” a few decades ago, it’s experiencing a small resurgence.  Radiohead’s In Rainbows was released as a “pay what you want” digital download, CD set as well as limited-edition vinyl. In Rainbows, the vinyl edition, was the top-selling vinyl album of 2008 and single-handedly helped 2008 vinyl sales almost double.

The main point is this: With consumers unwilling to pay for traditional music formats, artists and labels are forced to find new (or old) ways to package their music.  The industry has been in decline for the better part of a decade, and it seems to be turning a much-needed corner by trying to innovate instead of just complain and punish.

I’m interested in keeping an eye on artists and labels who are embracing this innovation instead of shunning it, and wonder who we’ll see coming out with new methods of distribution next.

Any ideas?

*this photo made available under the Creative Commons license by Carolyn Coles