Drupal and the Music Business

Please tell me what you think is essential for a first "drupal music solution".
What marketing material is needed?
Can anybody provide numbers, charts etc. about music & artist-websites and what cms they are using?
I guess mostly wordpress.

Is there a solution out for a "mySpace"-replacement?
Is there anything interesting besides Facebook & Twitter, cause I am of the opinion that myspace is dead for artists, bands & creatives.

Mori - I set Musicosity up as a free service for Artists based on Drupal - see http://musicosity.co.uk/ which is the flagship. We also have live test sites http://us.musicosity.com/ for US (California and Oregon) and http://musicosity.com.au/ for Australia.

Right now it has profiles, events, video (embedded), audio and oter content. Every artist is an OG, and some have their own Virtual sites with their own domain - there's a few promoters on there too. Artists can email everyone in their OG - this is their "Audience". We don't do bulk marketing email as standard but can arrange that if that's what others want. The idea is not just t be a technology, where Artists are "on their own", but a service, encouraging industy to work together.

A lot of people believe the solution is to give Artists independent website/features/functionality - but I believe it's sharing a common database. Apart from being a musician, I'm also in marketing/analytics, and worked in organisations who use data to do better customer communications. Email is dying - it's not viable to have thousands of micro mailing lists, newsletters, blasts as well as Facebook/Myspace updates and Tweets. The only organisations who do CRM well are banks and telcos because as a consumer you typically only have 1 relationship with them at a time. But in music we can have relationships with dozens of entities - none of whom know what anyone else is sending the same customer. Consequently the customer gets spammed, and no one tracks their responses - and we're meant to be the good guys!

So the philosophy of Musicosity is to focus on the Audience, and accept that Artists, Venues and promoters all share this precious resource. We must respect the audience, give them space and allow them to feel like they have some choice/control over their communications. At the same time, we need to aid discovery, so for Artists who don't have an audience (let alone in another geo) then bringing people together makes sense.

Nobody likes spam, but everybody appreciates a good recommendation and likes to save time. At least by being on a shared database we can offer the customer the ability to join OG's, subscribe etc. Secondly we can track email responses, identify associated content, facilitate recommendations - less spam, more relevance. Drupal's potential is enormous for providing insights - much more interesting what a customer does on your site than with your email.

We've come a long with way with minimal resource, and I'm happy to discuss further.

Cheers,

Mick

I completely agree that Bandcamp rocks. Do note that Warner Bros. Records and Sony both use Drupal as their band platform. I've worked with WBR on a number of projects quite a while back and do know that they were moving in the direction of Features. Perhaps there could be some work here on an general open platform based on the work these labels have done? I'm sure that the investment could help them both. Tons of interesting possibilities in this space. This is not an itch that I have to scratch but I'd love to see it happen.