What else is bubbling away in the darkened beanbags in Silicon Valley that is blending the Geek thinking with your average consumer of social stuff...
Facebook developers have been busy creating some great applications and platform developments, as they continue to rally to Mark Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook being the next pervasive platform. We already have social gaming and Farmville from Zynga and the ongoing debate, especially over here in the US with Privacy fears and concerns - allowing the ad revenue and potential to drive more targeted ads, as well as the stupidly tagged "F-Commerce" where we have retailers displaying their wares on Facebook stores - all accounts and feedback is that it's a nice touch but not really gaining the traction or conversion that the Facebook Marketing Team promised. 500million users maybe a great number to throw on a table to show the size of your web "worth" but it's not just about that - with the average Facebook user dropping in to update status, check in with friends, upload pictures... there is a disconnect to the f-commerce that just doesn't feel right - and the users are not converting on the Facebook platform, as they drive back to the main site for added security and comfort...
But I thought this was about music, I hear you cry - yes I'm getting to it!! One thing that Facebook has understood is the connection between music and people, especially 500million people, it connects us, divides us, unites us and drives debate and emotion. Zuckerberg has always publicly stated that Facebook is not about Music, web users have MySpace for that - but as MySpace officially gets ready for sale this week, users are dropping off the cliff, and last reports were that the once 250million strong community has dropped under the 100million mark now and ad revenue is going cheaper than most of Google's Ad Words.
MySpace and specifically MySpace Music, was an online home for "artists" (well for labels and managers to easily have an additional global website to connect to fans) and the lure of the massive community base with the iTunes age of $0.99 per track anyway to tap into that and at least convert some of these listeners at little to no cost was another line item on their P&L. It didn't work, once News Corp. purchased (with the exact same ethos of converting the web traffic into ad revenue clicks and banner space to gain billion$ of dollar$) the site was ad heavy, it all seemed to false, fake and users dropped off and the stats that came through was that the average weekly visitor onto MySpace Music was in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions that was expected.
So as we look across the music landscape, how is technology going to support and help the new artists and the clutch of reality programs (yes over here we have Simon Cowell's X-Factor launching in September!!) they want a home where they can upload music to share, "like" comment on, share, and while you're at it if you have your online playlists up there as well - Facebook can drive more targeted content and music content to you. So Facebook developing their version of Amazon's Cloud Drive? You'd be crazy to think that this is not almost complete, with Google Music & iTunes MyMusic all lining up later this year - the buzz word in the music industry is that Cloud based services with consumers own music available to stream direct to your Android (maybe iPhone) is the big thing for 2011.
How do you make money from this, there is a plethora of digital media being stored - think of Amazon's 5Gb initial offer x just 100million of Facebook's community that would then be 500,000,000Gb of content -that's a lot of media to maintain and stream to your end users using content distribution networks around the globe. So I think that it will be dropped in a trial basis such as UK or US to begin with to understand the dynamics and scalability - as the rumblings are that just like F-Commerce there won't be the massive uptake of the service and it will be used mainly by labels to push their latest releases to the Facebook community to get near time feedback and of course bring in some of that advertising (with US based radio revenues up 5% to $14bn) there is a big chunk of cash out there, especially when you get around some of the privacy elements and can generate and target your community...
Final word of warning though, the Music Industry has seen their business turned inside out and upside down over the last decade, while they look at every new model and opportunity - (MySpace was once heralded as the web savior of the music industry), the fact remains that only the few have actually made this work, and that success was based on a number of key elements 1) closed platform, 2) mass adoption of the hardware, 3) Global Consumer base... luckily Facebook has two out of three of these elements, and with the world of Apps, to deploy your software on every smartphone from Apple to Google to Microsoft, the third isn't that far off - Zuckerberg and his team may just pull it off again and then he will be crowned the savior of the Music Industry among his other web accolades...