New Music Widgets Level The Playing Field

Several great new music widgets have become available recently and its all good news for both music marketers and fans. These small easy to create mini-applications allow web designers and your average fan to customize and drop them virtually anywhere on the web including MySpace profiles, blogs and more.

Sonific’s nifty Songspot currently in beta and available to CDBaby users allows the instant creation of a customized song player that be dropped in the middle of a site or blog with ease. We’ve pasted a Songspot below that took less than a minute to create and here is another on a MySpace page.

Napster founder Shawn Fanning and his SnoCap have also created a widget that can be dropped onto sites like the MySpace page of UK’s The Format which links back to SnoCap for 79 cent track sales controlled by the band. The band even makes it easy for fans to spread the word by putting the widget’s code ready for copying and pasting right on their MySpace profile.

YouTube makes what is essentially a widget available next to every video and the practice has led to incredible use across the net all linking back to YouTube.

With these and other widgets so easy to create and use they can almost be used as quickly and effectively as hyperlinks currently are. A reviewer won’t just provide a link to band’s website; they can drop in a widget that allows the reader to play the song and purchase it instantly. Widget’s also empower the creator by cutting out more middlemen like iTunes in the transaction process if that’s the goal or they can drive sales to a preferred source.

What’s up next for widgets?  Concert tickets? Merchandise?