Having friends helps

The Groove Armada and Bacardi partnership announced last year was significant and heralded a new era of commercial partnerships with content creators, not just for the music industry. So is their first digital output, a music distribution platform called Bliveshare, going to set the world on fire?

Well, I see a number of challenges:

• It’s “another music sharing platform”
• Last.fm…
• Heavily reliant on sharing i.e. recruiting friends
• Sharing mechanic is simplified but not neccessarily easy to action (you have a bespoke URL you email/blog/add to your facebook profile)
• Online sharing & recommendations is about interacting with people of shared interests, not just sharing with people you already know
• You have to keep on giving to keep getting
• It doesn’t grab interest immediately as you have to wait for other people to take action (either my friends hate me or they are fed up with me sending them invites to stuff)

But it’s got some things going for it:

• Groove Armada
• Groove Armada’s fans
• If it works and attracts the kind of interest needed to make it a success then the potential is huge

I really want this partnership to succeed and good use of Social Media will be critical in my view. I couldn’t find many online reviews of the service – what do other people think of it?

Personally I like the fact that even as she’s about to hit the big time she does all the MySpace / YouTube / blog stuff herself. It allows her intelligence and sense of humour to come across, and you can’t help warming to her. Of course if she really makes it that’ll all be handed over to a lackey, but at this point it’s an example of how pop stars can use “social media” to promote themselves beyond just bunging a few tracks onto their MySpace. Or making videos that make them look like dicks.

Is it all pointless once marketers get involved ‘helping’ maintain social media platforms on behalf of artists? Or, is this just something we need to stop being precious about, much in the same way we accept stars have been media trained and not every autographed pic will be signed personally. What do you think?

[How to promote your music via social media]

While it isn’t yet ready to go head-to-head with services like Last.fm it’s positive to see a major label  take its first steps into ”free” music provision. Although it looks like the delivery, via live streaming only, shows Sony BMG is not on board with We7′s DRM position.

This is diplomatically expressed as:

“Initially, not all the tracks will be available to listen to in all the formats but We7 will continue to work with the music industry to break down the barriers to bring even greater choice to users in the coming months.”

The We7 proposition has always seemed a strong one to me – and I don’t even get paid to say that now! While getting more and higher quality (no offense intended) content on the site is still a challenge for them I can only encourage people to sign-up, check it out and drive more deals like these.

And, if you’re an emerging artists junkie then check out their unsigned bands section too. This generation of artists is going to shape music distribution via social media.

What’s next? I’m waiting for a video announcement…