Alternative to facebook?

HCL

Holy Crap! Lions!
Jul 13, 2010
672
0
16
Plymouth, UK
I'm so sick of how awful facebook is for music. I'd migrate to somewhere that combines the social aspect of facebook with art/music/culture in an instant, but I can't think of anywhere that does it well.

Is there anywhere else worth looking at? I long for the days where music was a big part of your individuality and I honestly think that as people shift more and more of their lives online, facebook is playing a big role in stripping away the music element of our social lives where say, myspace encouraged it.
 
Might be best to just have your own website and link facebook to it via a player.

Here's a new music site that I've seen mentioned, similar to soundcloud
http://official.fm/

Havent tried it though. Very similar to soundcloud, but a little more refined.
 
I long for the days where music was a big part of your individuality and I honestly think that as people shift more and more of their lives online, facebook is playing a big role in stripping away the music element of our social lives where say, myspace encouraged it.

HUGE +1 to that! Myspace seemed to be designed around finding new music, whereas Facebook seems to be trying to make it as difficult as possible! The amount of times I've been unable to search for a band who's name I know is unreal! I have to go to google and type "bandname Facebook" to get it!
 
Facebook is not designed to be a platform for music, it's not myspace, I don't understand why you would expect it to be?
Myspace failed fucking gangnam style, facebook would have to be retarded to allow the same to happen to them.

Blogs and forums are the best way to find new music, facebook is good for letting you know what bands you are already aware of are doing.
 
You're definitely right in that it's not designed for music. But I don't think you can deny that in spite of that it's become easily the largest online music platform, bands are there promoting their music there because that's where the people (potential fans) are. And as long as Facebook is the most popular social networking site then bands big and small will continue to use it as their primary platform for promotion. So why not try to encorporate it more into the site and encourage it? Making it easier to find new music will certainly not kill Facebook. In fact I imagine it would bring even more traffic to the site (if that's even possible at this stage!)
 
Facebook is not designed to be a platform for music, it's not myspace, I don't understand why you would expect it to be?
Myspace failed fucking gangnam style, facebook would have to be retarded to allow the same to happen to them.

Blogs and forums are the best way to find new music, facebook is good for letting you know what bands you are already aware of are doing.

Blogs and forums don't have the same kind of popular userbase the conventional social networks have though*, and obviously facebook isn't designed to be a music platform or I wouldn't be asking if an alternative existed. I trawl forums every day, but most people don't and from what I can see, it's visibly hurt engagement with music that facebook doesn't really integrate with any artistic or cultural activities.

Myspace was great for bands to organise, network and reach out to fans. It's no surprise that musicians were the last users to leave the site. Facebook hasn't got anything close to it, and it's all fine and well using phones, blogs and forums but the connectivity of the music scene is suffering at the moment.

*Trev hit the nail on the head. Facebook is where the people are - remember before there were pages there? Band's used groups to connect to listeners and promote themselves. As long as it has the people, musicians will use it to promote themselves. Unfortunately for us, facebook is really horrible to promote music on.
 
Soundcloud has a new "share option" so it's a little more social but best thing to do is get on Instagram and plug your stuff, put samples on Soundcloud, share a Youtube video over FB, etc. There's a new Instagram type thing where you can do audio but probably not nearly the quality for music. I post pictures of my son's band on Streamzoo and IG, and post on Tonefinder if there's some kind of sound test or something that isn't mixed yet.

If you haven't found it yet, then nobody else has so go where the people are and get your stuff out there. That's the only way.

Reverbnation has a pretty decent player for your band FB page. I've got a lot of friends on an independent label using that. Just remembered. I don't think it works well unless you do some Youtube and other stuff like I said. Even my crappy jamming around videos get noticed way more than any song I've put a lot of time into lol
 
As soon as the Graph Search rolls out, it should be way easier to discover new music and
stuff, facebook search always sucked, even facebook is aware of it and the Graph Search
is going to change that quite a bit.
If you want something with a little social part and arts and so on, Pinterest might be nice,
but it's not as social as FB at all and music is just a really small part.
Myspace is dead and Justin Timberlake put it on zombie-mode, soundcloud, reverbnation
and so on just get integrated into FB more and more, chances are high that it's actually
getting better and better over time to search for new music and so on.

Why am I thinking this?
1. Graph Search is a pretty sick tool to search for specific things and at the same time
to get inspiration and find new stuff based on the likes of your friends and so on.
2. Facebook integrates more and more applications (Spotify for example).
3. They're buying loads of shit, like location based services and stuff to integrate them
into FB.
4. I am pretty sure there are some nice things happening this year, they're working on
a better timeline design atm and so on.

I am using Pinterest, Twitter and FB on a daily basis, Google+ from time to time, but it's
a whole different thing, but there are no such things as Myspace's good years, it's just
over.