Bebo e Imeem salvam a industria musical?

«(...) Especially among 15- to 25-year-olds, people seem to need their peers to validate their musical tastes, making the Internet a perfect medium for the intersection of MP3s and mob psychology. (...) Imeem and Bebo are two Web sites trading on the idea that music is a social phenomenon, and that the Internet is the place to be to gather around it. Imeem asks, "What's on your playlist?," while Bebo calls itself a "social media network." Imeem draws 20 million visitors a month by specializing in free streaming music and music-video playlists that you can customize. The offerings are surrounded by information about the artists, rankings, related songs, polls, and profiles of other fans. (...)"We can target to hip-hop fans in L.A. who are also into indie films," said Steve Jang, Imeem's chief marketing officer. The most successful sites in any category, Jang maintains, are not the ones with the most money or the best technology, but the ones with the best "user experience," like the simple interface that Google started out with.The recent wave of social music sites that Imeem is a part of is showing the music industry that a free, open, ad-supported system is better than tying down digital songs with software that limits their playability, Jang said. Just look at radio and MTV, which have been sustained by advertising for years, he said. (...)Like Imeem, Bebo surrounds its offerings with extras: fan groups, artist information, concert dates and charts. Bebo, which has 40 million registered users and drew 11 million visitors last month from Britain alone, also lets its users bring in music and other media from Web sites like YouTube by using "widgets" that can be dropped on to personal pages. (...) Shields acknowledges that teenagers, the age group most attached to socializing around entertainment, do not have the kind of income that many advertisers would like to attract. But they make up for it with loyalty. As a testament to how attached Bebo users are, the average time spent on the site per session is 40 minutes - an eternity by Internet social-networking standards.»

fonte: «Could social networking sites save the music industry?», Victoria Shannon, IHT, 30/01/08