Just a short update on YouBloom.com. The new YouBloom.com just re-launched its contest site on May 3rd, and after the first round of the contest, it went exactly as predicted – the bands that were best able to get their own fan base to vote got the most votes.
There are no incentives at all to explore the music they offer, just a list of songs. You can search for songs by their limited genres, or for a specific artist or song. But then, you just click to vote.
If you have a big, active fan base, then this might be a good site for you. But you will have to be pesky with your fans. There is a new round of voting every week, and without a lot of votes (well, not so many while the site is still growing, but still, it is all about voting), your songs won’t advance.
January 20th was a very sad day for many artists and listeners of the site thesixtyone.com when the site abandoned many elements of its previous version, and launched a new one. Thesixtyone (T61) was a unique music site before. It built an amazing community with contact between artists and listeners not available on other sites. It was a vibrant living community.
The new T61 interface may look very pretty, but it is very shallow. It is merely another web radio station (and not a very good one) feeding listeners music based on unknown criteria with little or not control given to the listener. There is no compelling reason anymore to wade through the awful new interface.
From the start, however, the site management had nothing but disrespect for artists. I have heard this over and over. I believe that it is only because of the intimate nature of the artist/listener conversation the site previously allowed that artists continued to come to the site and upload new music.
That is all gone. The big family has been intentionally split up. And many listeners and artists are taking the loss very much like the loss of a loved family member.
But given the way the site used to treat the artists, and the fact they have cut off direct communication between artists and fan in many ways, there seems to be no particular reason for new, unknown, under-appreciated, already established, experimental, or any other kind of musical artist to support this site by providing their valuable content to the site for free.
And while the site does let artists sell their music there, I think the number of sales generated by the site is negligible for artists compared to other avenues they might have. There are much better ways to sell music than T61. The site did create new fans, but it was the communication, not the marketplace.
I predict the site will close within six months. The VCs should have watched more closely what their money was being used for. The site management has taken a wonderful community and murdered it. Whatever listener base they had will be gone, and any new visitors will soon leave. And I suspect artists will soon begin pulling their music from the site, and there will be nothing left to hear. And rightly so.
Farewell, T61. It was a good trip down the highway, but I guess all journeys must end. Too bad the destination was a dead end.
There is no good part about this, but I had planned to make T61 the object of one of the first reviews to be published here. No need to do that now – the site is no longer one of the good places for Indie Artists. There will be reviews of OurStage.com and StereoFame.com instead.
