Pinterest: The Next Social Frontier for Music, From ReadWriteWeb

Social Media is forever changing and evolving directly in front of us. For a band and we as a label, keeping up with the online trends, is par for course. Little more than a few months ago, SoundCloud is working with Pinterest on letting users embed streaming music within boards. This is indeed a great thing and we have already built a full streaming section into the Rusty Knuckles Pinterest page. 

For more information on what this holds for the future of streaming music within Pinterest, dive in deeper to the article below.

Check out the original article on ReadWriteWeb.com

Rusty Knuckles Music is now streaming through Pinterest - click here

"Pinterest is steadily growing out of the stereotype that it's just for sharing recipes and planning weddings. The social scrapbook already plays a central role in the social media strategies of visual artists, publishers and certain types of businesses. Now, with the addition of features for pinning music and video, musicians are catching on. 

Just as early-adopter bands and artists flocked to Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram, some are experimenting with visual bookmarking on Pinterest. Conventions are emerging as those brave enough to dive in head-first experiment with different approaches. 

The most obvious way musicians are using Pinterest is as a collection of visual artifacts from across the Web. This includes everything from photos of recent gigs, artists they admire or gear they love playing with to visual art that matches their music. This approach is akin to the way bands have used Tumblr.

Alanis Morissette uses Pinterest both as a promotional vehicle for her own work and as a way to connect with fans in a more meaningful way. That includes not only a scrapbook of personal photos but also a pinboard dedicated to sharing favorite quotes and a board titled "Alanis Recommends" containing mostly self-help books. These features add a personal flavor to her social media presence, something Pinterest is uniquely positioned to help facilitate.  

Beyond Pictures: Sound and Video

Despite its roots, Pinterest is no longer just about imagery. It also happens to be a good way to share sounds and videos, a fact that makes it increasingly appealing to musicians looking to promote their work. Music videos from sources like YouTube, Vimeo and others can be embedded directly into Pinterest pages and, not unlike Twitter or Tumblr, can be "repinned" by others, creating the potential for content to go viral. 

Last week, the site officially integrated with SoundCloud, a partnership that makes Pinterest an even more natural fit for bands and musicians. Until now, the most effective way to share a song on Pinterest was to pin a YouTube video containing the track. This new feature simplifies things a bit and provides an additional avenue for distributing audio files. 

Yoko Ono was quick to take advantage of SoundCloud support. The artist and wife of the late John Lennon uses the feature to embed new songs as well as audio clips from radio appearances. The "SoundCloud" board on Ono's account includes everything from music recorded with her late husband to a recent episode of a radio program on which Ono appeared with her son Sean Lennon. Her Pinterest account also serves as a home to past visual art projects, writings and activism-related links. 

Music outlets like The Fader, HypeBot, VH1 and MTV have also jumped on the Pinterest stage.Record labels are also using the service to promote artists and new releases. Many labels create boards specific to popular artists in their roster, effectively giving those artists a semi-official presence on the site without requiring them to manage it. This approach offers less opportunity for deep engagement with fans, but it's a start. 

Success Is Hard to Measure

As popular as Pinterest is becoming generally, for musicians it's still a realm of early adopters. Relatively few artists have official accounts on the site. Even Amanda Palmer, who is often noted for effective use of Twitter and other social platforms, hasn't pinned anything. 

How can an artist know whether Pinterest is paying off? Success can be difficult to gauge. Certainly, artists with a large following on Pinterest should expect to see an increase in video views, listens and click-throughs to related media and articles. For smaller acts, the payoff may not be as dramatic at first. In either case, metrics don't exist that would help artists and managers determine the effectiveness of a particular strategy. Did pinning those new tracks from SoundCloud help get them heard by more people? Maybe, but neither SoundCloud nor Pinterest offers analytics granular enough to know for sure. 

Pinterest doesn't yet have a huge community of bands and musicians, but features like SoundCloud integration will likely encourage more to take advantage of the service. What it does have is a sizable - and growing - user base, something artists would be wise to tap into early." 

Is Artists.MTV, Trying To Reinvent Music Platform, From Mashable.com

Alright, hold the phone, is this gonna actually work? Ok, we don't want to come off as pessimistic, but is MTV really trying to get back into music programming, by creating a new music discovery platform directly related to social media? Will be quite interested to see how all of this unfolds as there are a plethora of companies vying to be the dominating force in social networking when it comes to the music industry. 

One aspect that is quite compelling and worth the research is for upcoming bands to be only a few clicks away from much larger acts, as you can create your own band page within the site. These close encounters could really help to gain exposure for the multitudes of bands looking for their big break or for fans to find them through simply cruising the site. 

Go to original article on Mashable.com

Dive into Artists.MTV and request an invite



"When you hear a new band and you want to know more about them, the first place you go is probably Google. But searching for them yields a glut of disconnected information. You want to hear their music. You want to see if they use social media. Maybe you want to see them on tour or actually buy something to support them. And you never know if you’re going to find that all in one place.

Official band websites are often lacking, and fail to link between different platforms. You need a hub — something that connects things like Twitter, Bandcamp, and Soundcloud in on place. You specifically don’t want to have to conduct multiple Google searches just to find out if this band even uses those services.

This is a problem for both casual and diehard music fans, and that’s where Viacom thinks it has a big solution. That solution is Artists.MTV, a service which Viacom hopes will be artist-driven and which will replace artist pages on MTV.com beginning today.

Dermot McCormack, EVP of Digital for Viacom Music & Logo Group, believes that this solution specifically addresses what he calls the “post-Myspace world.”

“No one had stepped into that space to provide quality, trusted information around the artists you love, curated in a loving way,” he said. “We saw a need in the space and we thought we had the brand, the assets, and the temperament to do it.”

More than simply revamping the artist page — which in the past would have been controlled, owned, and managed by MTV — the new platform offers artists the opportunity to claim their page, or in the case of independent or emerging bands to create their own. From there, they are offered customization options, including the ability to create a Facebook Timeline-like cover photo.


Perhaps most impressive is that Artists.MTV is more than just an opportunity for bands to play in MTV’s sandbox. If you’re an established artist with MTV content to your name, it appears on your artist page. For artists with a long history tied to MTV, there’s even content from the early days, like this 1984 footage of a very young Madonna. Some early video content is being digitized for the first time ever.

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Madonna, Music News

But if a band has never had any MTV exposure, it can still sign up and populate its page with its own content. This is an important development for MTV. In conversation with McCormack, he consistently talked about MTV’s need to empower and give back to artists. The best way to do that is to make the platform open to anyone, which they’ve done. They’ve populated the database with one million artists, some of which they worked with in advance, like Band of Horses, to get their page populated. Others, from huge artists like Lady Gaga to smaller, independent acts will have the opportunity to “claim” their page starting on Sept. 6.

Down the line, there are various opportunities for artists to make money off their page, which is huge. While anyone will have the opportunity to promote their music via iTunes, Bandcamp, or any other vendor of their choosing, there will also be an ad revenue share for artists once the platform exits its beta period. While details of this have yet to be made available, this means artists will have the opportunity to make money directly via their MTV page — a very important step toward the empowerment that McCormack touted.

In order for that to be a success, both artists and fans will need to adopt the platform as a go-to music option. MTV appears to be ready for them. Whether or not they are willing to accept MTV as the middleman between them is what remains to be seen."