Google +1 – A Powerful New Music Marking Tool
Google Search has become the standard for how we find everything including music and tickets. It's why music marketers care about Wikepedia and MySpace – they rank high in search results. Yesterday, Google introduced a new feature that influences those results, +1. To recommend something, users click a +1 button on a page or ad much like a tweet or like button with results appearing in Google search. More + Video:
To start, we'll see +1 buttons appear next to Google Search results, ads and with other Google products. But over time Google hopes that web designers, bloggers and others will add +1 buttons too. Marketers know they value of making social sharing easy. Most artists, however, have been slow to add tweet, like and other sharing buttons; not just on the front page of their site, but also next to individual blog posts, tour dates and other information that fans are often eager to broadcast.
More info on Google +1 here and watch the intro video:
Unfortunately, it has gotten more and more difficult for us music lovers who are our own A&R men to look for new or obscure releases by typing the name of a favourite artist or studio musician into the search field of an internet search engine because those search engines are optimised to enlist the most popular (or the most paid for) items first. Hence, the albums enlisted first with contributions by a favourite musician are usually the ones I already own. The fact that digital promo albums which come without album credits, have basically replaced hardcopy promo released by now, has hurt the databases of album credits websites such as allmusic.com, discogs.com and albumcredits.com severely when it comes to new releases because they simply cannot update when they do not get any data. You could say people bought more albums in the 60s when nobody knew who the Wrecking Crew was because the albums they played on did not have any album credits either, but today, after a period in which extensive availability of album credits has garnered at least a small fan base to almost every studio musician who is popular amongst the artists who employ him, letting that source of information slowly run out of print feels to a fan like the labels are deliberately trying to cut off the Long Tail, like they do not want customers like the breed of music fans that are currently on this planet: the ones who are picky and buy seemingly obscure albums by independent artists whereas they let the heavily promoted, glossy, overly polished Pro-Toolery, streamlined to get that oh so commercial middle of the road radio sound, rot in the aisles.
And I cannot blame the labels because being google’s customer helps them make their celebrity music business model work, but there are other business models, too. I have discovered many great (and new) independent artists by now because on their albums, there played a handful of studio veterans who are well-known to music lovers like me despite them maybe never having had a hit record of their own. I guess that business model is the original one that the music scene had before the marketers of celebrity culture came in. Yet, in the current era of home recording and fame for being famous, the labels seem to mostly have left behind this model so it’s now free to use for independent artists who have been eating into the labels market share big time over the previous decade. I have gotten the impression that some of the independent artists that I have discovered this way have done some work to get their album further up in the google results, but that was possible even without a +1 button. Yet, what does google have to offer to people like me who are their own A&R men and want to be able to get to search results on obscure albums more quickly?
I recognize this is good for me, especially with my tech-obsessive quasi-autistic fanbase, but shit…this is the OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANT FROM GOOGLE. I want impartial cyborg algorithm results, not a f’ing never-ending popularity contest.
This seems like a supremely dumb move.
This is only going to improve searching IF they give searchers the option to ignore the +1 feature. I agree with Jones up there – this could be useful for some, but I’m against it if we can’t opt our searches out of this thing.
Checkout Google +Like.
It addsa Facebook Like button to every Google search result. See how many people liked each of the results and who from your friends already have recommended it
http://bit.ly/hcOySg
If you are looking for information about a specific artist, then narrow your search. Google is too broad. last.fm has a pretty comprehensive database, but if you are looking for info about obscure releases nothing beats asking hardcore fans directly, or even tweeting the actual artists. Ask on forums. There’s more to the internet than Google and a bunch of websites! There is so much out there. Find something that suits the purpose you need!
Google generally turn off all their iGoogle customisation when you are logged out of the service. I imagine this would be the same.
Thank you, Google; as this type of mark up really helpful. I really and prolifically experienced its useful (effectiveness) in bringing up new visitors to my blog from all the three (3) giant search engines (Bing, Google, and Yahoo!
Again, I deeply thank you both (Google)
When you see a bucket of screws at the hardware store, you probably don’t think of them as technology.