Social network music: a new business model for online streaming music service?
- Posted at 2008/08/28 19:51
- Filed under Thoughts
At Qbox, we believe that our social network music streaming service is perfectly suited to address the music industry's unwillingness to let go of the ghost on untenable licensing terms. Social network music refers to the music published directly by artists on their own profile pages, often on large social networking sites but increasingly on their own, independent sites. MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube are the leading social networks (all of which Qbox indexes), but there are other smaller networks such as hi5, Cyloop, Goldmic, and PerfSpot that focus on specific genres (e.g., hip hop) or specific ethnic communities. There are also white-label web service tools such as Marc Andreessen's Ning or Ian Rogers's Top Spin that provide customizable social networking functionalities.
Qbox aggregates the tens of millions of streamable tracks spread across multiple social networking sites through Qplayer. You create your own playlists and Qplayer provides continuous playback across the different social networks, similar to how Twhirl integrates Twitter and Friendfeed.
The Qbox model differs from those of other streaming services such as Pandora, Imeem and Last.fm in that we let you search and discover music on artists' profile pages that stream promotional tracks for free. Similar to the way Google brings traffic to online media properties that they do not own, Qbox simply brings the user to artist pages that stream legal and free music. This approach allows us to stay clear of the constraints imposed by the labels.
We believe social network music is the model of the future, where fans interact directly with musicians who give away their work for free in anticipation of other, more lucrative revenue sources. We've carved out advertising space on the Qplayer application, which will help us generate and share ad revenues directly with musicians/copyright holders. We believe artists can and will realize meaningful revenues even with free streaming, as long as their fans enjoy and consume their work.
Posted by Ian
- Tag
- future of online music, pandora, Qbox, social network music
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