Harvard Business Publishing

To follow up on my last post about MySpace Music pandering to famous musicians rather than opening the door to the upstart musicians who may appeal only to a limited fan base, I would like to suggest: this model isn't going to work.

As one blogger says: "The advertising revenues from MySpace Music are going to be spread amongst a lot of people, and nobody should count on becoming rich. All that streaming revenues are going to do is pay for recruiting more artists. The sad part is that artists are going to be the last guys to see the money -- if any."

But let's assume -- for a moment -- that maybe MySpace is on to something, and this will be a chance for unknowns to reach a wider audience. And to it's to that thought that I relate a commerce-numbing statistic from a band manager friend of mine:

Musician X: 22,550 MySpace friends. 91 albums sold.

In other words, Musician X had gotten wide exposure on MySpace and it translated into less than $1,000 of sales for her CD.

The fact that MySpace are hoping to turn their service into little more than a social network-based Pandora that relies on already established stars only reinforces that they know that converting friends to music buyers is flawed. (Here's the same idea in New Yorker cartoon form.)

In my opinion, the salvation of the music industry and musicians lies more in the power of personalization that the Internet can bring. After all, MySpace has helped artists like Dane Cook become famous. But only because he cultivated his fan base with personal communications, not a generic "old media" approach that talked down to the fans in the street, like say, a giant billboard in Times Square.

What do you think? Is the Internet no different than a store where you are led to purchases through advertising and mass marketing tools? Or is the Internet a place where the personal approach can be brought to bear in ways that even the most ardent fan club could ever hope to achieve, that is, by granting access directly to the star--as in a blog by Britney--or to any musician or artist that you'd like to know better? Or, would that level of personalization really just take too much time on the part of the artist? Can fame come one fan at a time?