Web Music Services for bands - revisited

I've talked about this before, but the social web is developing fast and well, so there are news on the field... So let me revisit the topic, and talk a little about the "new web music services for bands".

I'm going to list five services that can help bands promote themselves, and fans to easily access to their favourite bands and even help them. Here they are:

ReverbNation is a newcomer on this blog. Basicly, ReverbNation started last October as yet another music social network, in the vein of services like PureVolume. The thing is that since they started they didn't stop adding new features, some of them really cool for artists. But what makes them start this list is a feature that they don't yet have but will do in July: an ad revenue sharing program for their artists, called “Fair Share”. With this, fans are giving to their artists money each time they visit the artist webpage and specially when clicking in the ads presented there. Alternative sources of incoming are allways cool, right?

Then, another newcomer. Poptopus isn't a music social network, or something that lets bands have pages. Instead, they make widgets with songs submited by artists, and that widgets contain ads. That means that a blogger, for instance, can have a music player with songs of his choice in its website, and the revenue from the ads in there are splited between the blogger, the artist of the tracks presented there, and Poptopus, of course. Once again, yet another source of incoming. Their closed beta is going to start soon.

Then, we're back to those I've already talked about. GrooveShark is getting bigger and better day by day, even if still in Alpha. I'm still swapping e-mails with them and plan to have a new blog post about it soon enough, but the concept is good: a legal p2p music network where you're paid to share and artists whose tracks are shared too.

SellABand also keeps going on, and are, at least, a very successful case of an indie label - after all in less than an year they've managed to launch several bands albums and compilations, besides organizing events - for instance. Here listeners pay to give the bands a chance to release an album, and after they can make money out of it.

Last.fm continues to be awsome, a great way for a band to expose themselves if well exploited. They're experiencing a boom of users now that Pandora is enforcing their users to be located in the United States, yet there are rumours of Viacom wanting to buy them which are no good news.

Also, I'm curious about two new services that might be quite interesting: We7 and Playable. When more info on those are announced, I'll surely let you know...