Social Media Networks Music's Savior and Curse

I liked this article (wired usually is pretty good), which talked about how social media networks including torrenting/downloading have hurt music sales big time and taken money away from iTunes, but at the same time they are able to offer a way to save the music industries: Advertising. Targeted advertising is helped greatly by social networks, because usually they are able to group like users together. The argument this article makes is that social media networking will eventually group users together very effectively which will allow for more targeted advertising, thus helping the music biz.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/social-networks/

This article prompted me to think of Pandora. Pandora allows users to listen to free music by having the user type in a song title or artist. It creates a radio statio for the user by playing music that is similiar to their first entry. Although this music is free to the users, this is really good advertising because they are introducing the user to artists that are similar in genre to the artist they like. In addition, information is provided about the artist at the bottom of the page, in which users also can see 5 similiar artists. This is a good example of targeted advertising.