The Need for an Internet Non-Proliferation Treaty

Life was easy in 2006. There was only one superpower in Internet music – www.myspace.com. It had everything a musician could need: web hosting, a tidy player which told you how many times your track had been played, a blog and ways of communicating with your audience. It could even propel you to fame and fortune after all if it could happen to Lilly Allen and Kate Nash why not you?

Alas if you weren’t a fat bird with a mockney accent the dream quickly soured. The site was overwhelmed with spam from other musicians, the page designs were terrible and traffic evaporated after FaceBook took over the online proletariats narcissistic needs (yes I really do love that word).

This only changed so much however. Musicians still needed a virtual display cabinet for their wares but now they wanted a shop and delivery service too. MySpace didn’t really adapt, and into the void there rushed a gaggle/pod/flock of new websites.

There really are a fuckload of people offering similar services and it’s a pain. If the title lead you to think that this blog would form some kind of impassioned plea for life, love and unity with a smattering of conspiracy theories, I am sorry. It’s just a review of some of the websites I have used to whore my music. This is all written from a musician’s perspective – get in touch if you have any thoughts as a listener.

There are three new serious sites that I have identified: iMeem, SoundCloud and BandCamp. I have been using all of them and here is what I have found so far.

iMeem:
TwinMotion Page

Player:


Its dreadful, your URL (the thing you type into the box at the top of your internet) is a random jumble of numbers, the background interface is shocking and the traffic is composed entirely of approximately 30 -50 lost young teenagers scrabbling around for goodness knows what (AIDS probably, at least if the Daily Mail is to be trusted). The flash player is okay but its not enough, don’t waste your time with this crap site. The worst crime for me is putting ‘i’ in front of any product name. Nature gifted you an imagination capable of almost anything, so fucking use it.

SoundCloud:
TwinMotion Page

Player:

Scream (Original) by TwinMotion

SoundCloud looks rather promising, it has a slick interface, no adverts, a customisable flash player and very detailed statistics. ZOMG! I CAN HAS SOUNDCLART PLZ? Not so fast, it costs money now. This site rocked when it was in beta but now it’s fully launched it costs money to join and not a small amount either – 80 odd quid per year. There is a free account, which offers 5 track uploads per month and very limited statistics.

Your page cannot be customised at all and there's no blog/news facility so it’s only really a host. That’s good thing for me, I don’t need another blog or yet another website, what I do need is web space and bandwidth for my tracks and widgets to get my music around the internet. You can see some of the widgets on this page; I have a setlist ready to play at the bottom, and a dropbox thing for people to send me music via SoundClouds servers on the right.

The player itself is fantastic, it has timed comments and little links on the top right corner. You can set this link to a site where the track can be purchased (the tune above is linked to juno - an online record shop) or allow the track to be downloaded. There is no limit on track length so this is a great way for djs to distribute mix sets.

It’s still the Internet though - like hell am I paying for anything, soon as my trial expires I will be downgrading to the free account.

BandCamp.mu:
TwinMotion Page

Player:
This is an interesting operation as it does a bit more than your common garden hosting and flash player site. These people allow you to sell your music too so long as you have a PayPal account. There’s a few options too, sell top audio quality tracks for a price you set or sell top audio quality tracks for a price your buyer sets ala Radiohead (expect if you don’t have a worldwide fan base of devotees like Radiohead do, you are going to get fuck all) and you also have the option to give away a low quality version too.

To make all this work they insist you upload a full fat .wav file (these are the moulds that MP3’s are cast from). It’s a long haul, bearable if it’s just a tune getting uploaded, but an album would really take all day.

Pages can be customised to an extent – you can have a banner and a picture. Great, no more amateur designers fucking up the Internet with their tasteless and half arsed pages like MySpace encouraged.

The flash player is rather funky too; you can display artwork or some cool little visualizations. The statistics are broken down in a clever fashion with plays separated into full plays, partial plays and skips which will give you an idea of which tracks people are really into.

I really like this site, despite the creators being nauseatingly Californian. They say its going to be kept free or charge, and free of adverts as it will be funded by taking a cut of all tracks sold on the site. Its a nice idea and i hope it works out. The only real issue is the name BandCamp which for a certain generation will always be associated with the misuse of flutes. If you can get past this then its a fantastic service.

MySpace:
TwinMotion Page

While traffic has dropped significantly since arseface turned up, it’s still far busier than the 3 upstarts. The player is shit and cannot be embedded in other sites (yet) and there are no statistics at all.

It is, however, possible to have the best of both words – get a MySpace page and then embed it with track players from other site. This way you can still benefit from all the traffic on MySpace, without having to suffer the crappy player. If you wanted to be really sneaky, you could even get yourself a regular page, fill it with tracks and never again have to hear ‘this user does not accept requests from bands’.

Conclusions:

• MySpace is still the best way to get your music heard by lots of people.
  
• Get a SoundCloud and or BandCamp account to use their funky players.
• Avoid iMeem.
• Its essential for websites to be composed of two words with the space omitted for extra funk.