Bands & Internet Social Services

One of the main drivers of MySpace's growth was the ability to find cool, new music on the site. Bands marketed themselves to site members by sending "Friend Adds" and politely asking you to listen to their music. I didn't do much of this, because I tend to be a follower with new music - waiting for the Belloni's, Ziser's, Preuss's, Kenna's and Kreitler's of the world to tell me what I should be listening to. However, there were a lot of people who took advantage of this new access to the cutting edge. Contrast MySpace's growth with that of Friendster, and you can see how important embedding music (and customizing profiles in general), really was.

I bring this up because something interesting is beginning on Twitter. For those of you who don't know, Twitter is a 1 to Many texting service that allows you to send one text status update, and all of your friends who follow your Twitter stream are updated instantly. It's kind of like real-time and short hand blogging. It's a pretty interesting phenomena and you should check it out.

Well, I've just received my second unsolicited Twitter "Add" by a band I've never heard of. Twitter let's you know who is following you, so when I saw someone I didn't know, I checked them out. Not a bad way to get exposure for your music. In this soon to be ubiquitous WiFi enabled world we live in, it can't be too long before I can stream these unknown band's music over my phone.

Once again, the creativity of bands is driving adoption of new social Internet services.