A useful addition?
Those of you who used to have a profile on MySpace will undoubtedly remember what an absolute dog's dinner that site was; riddled with coding-errors and malfunctions due to its trying to be all things to all people, and idiotic users doing stupid things such as posting multiple music-players and videos on their profile pages, all set to play by default. However, as a networking site for bands and music-lovers, I don't think MySpace has ever been bettered. It combined a large user-base with the ability for bands and their fans to post readily-playable music on their profiles. While currently-existing web-sites such as Bandcamp and ReverbNation provide this facility, they lack the social-networking element which allows bands to promote their music to a wide audience, and for that audience to easily locate and play music that interests them.
I played in a band, Sad Society, from 2007 to 2009, when MySpace was at its most popular. I set up a MySpace page with music-player for the band, and within two or three months we'd acquired over 20,000 followers, largely on the strength of the band's music. Very few of those followers would have been aware of the band if it hadn't been for the opportunity presented by MySpace to promote it. Unfortunately, MySpace was soon taken over by a multi-national media corporation (Rupert Murdoch, IIRC) which, in attempting to eliminate the coding-errors and malfunctions, also did away with the user-customisation features which made the site attractive and useful to most users, causing its popularity to plummet catastrophically. It still exists, but is now of little use to either ordinary users or to bands.
This is a screen-shot of Sad Society's music-player on ReverbNation, which is similar to the music-player on their old MySpace profile page, except that the MySpace version allowed for six tracks to be posted. It occurred to me some time ago that if LiveJournal was to introduce a similar music-player which could be posted on user-profiles, it would combine one of the most useful features of MySpace with a social-networking site which, unlike MySpace, is malfuction-free and has a clear, simple layout, yet is user-customisable. Bands could create LiveJournal profiles and use this site to engage with fans and promote their music to a wider audience. It might be just the thing to boost LiveJournal's membership, interaction and general usefulness. Could LiveJournal be prevailed upon to introduce a music-player? I'd be interested to know if anyone thinks this would be a useful feature, or if they would regard it as a distraction or unnecessary complication.
Poll LiveJournal music-player
I played in a band, Sad Society, from 2007 to 2009, when MySpace was at its most popular. I set up a MySpace page with music-player for the band, and within two or three months we'd acquired over 20,000 followers, largely on the strength of the band's music. Very few of those followers would have been aware of the band if it hadn't been for the opportunity presented by MySpace to promote it. Unfortunately, MySpace was soon taken over by a multi-national media corporation (Rupert Murdoch, IIRC) which, in attempting to eliminate the coding-errors and malfunctions, also did away with the user-customisation features which made the site attractive and useful to most users, causing its popularity to plummet catastrophically. It still exists, but is now of little use to either ordinary users or to bands.
This is a screen-shot of Sad Society's music-player on ReverbNation, which is similar to the music-player on their old MySpace profile page, except that the MySpace version allowed for six tracks to be posted. It occurred to me some time ago that if LiveJournal was to introduce a similar music-player which could be posted on user-profiles, it would combine one of the most useful features of MySpace with a social-networking site which, unlike MySpace, is malfuction-free and has a clear, simple layout, yet is user-customisable. Bands could create LiveJournal profiles and use this site to engage with fans and promote their music to a wider audience. It might be just the thing to boost LiveJournal's membership, interaction and general usefulness. Could LiveJournal be prevailed upon to introduce a music-player? I'd be interested to know if anyone thinks this would be a useful feature, or if they would regard it as a distraction or unnecessary complication.
Poll LiveJournal music-player