Labbler: Does The Music Industry Need A Social Network?

Labbler is a relatively new music industry social network that is now in public beta. It plans to connects "Artists, Labels, Booking Agencies, Venues, Media and Fans as well as providing tools for all business needs of these groups." But though the sites looks nice and these groups of people all do need to connect in various ways, it's unclear why they would use Labbler to do so.

Labbler's website has a nice design that earned it some positive attention over the summer.

Quick Look at Labbler Interface

Labbler's features are straightforward with profiles, activity feeds and networking tools. Music-specific features include SoundCloud track imports, Beatport data imports and track uploads.

The homepage includes an extensive list of features and also the primary roles and business pages that can be included:

Artist
Label
Club
Media
Promoter
Booking

Though their self-description mentions fans there really isn't a clear role for them to play. In addition, the above categories plus Events are featured as navigation tabs across the social network and this also excludes fans as a category so it's currently not really designed for fans.

That may actually be a good thing since business networking and fan contact seem difficult to mix effectively.

As a music industry network the biggest problem facing Labbler is that artists and business people are already networking through a variety of services including LinkedIn and Twitter. But music industry specific networks have failed to break through and no one has been able to become the LinkedIn or Twitter of the music industry.

That means the challenge of giving people a reason to use Labbler looms much larger than effective design and operation of such a website.

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/App.net) blogs about music crowdfunding at Crowdfunding For Musicians (@CrowdfundingM). To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.