Why Billboard.com is Destined for Failure
Musicians and their fans are meant to be hip, sometimes tragically so.
RWW recently reviewed 18 streaming music services and our readers still had at least a dozen more suggestions. New and innovative music sites are springing up like daisies this summer, so at first glance when Billboard magazine announces the launch of their new online community, smaller independent sites should be shaking in their boots. Powered by streaming music from Lala.com, a Ticketmaster concert sales engine and All Music Guide's artist info, Billboard aims to offset waning sales and encourage a new generation of fans.
The site offers newly searchable charts, music news, artist interviews and videos. Billboard's vice president of online Joshua Engroff also spoke about the company's plans to launch iPhone and Facebook applications. The company stresses the fact that subscribers and non-subscribers will be able to search charts at no cost and listen to singles before choosing to purchase them. Nevertheless, despite Billboard's hopes to further evolve into a consumer brand, I can't help but think the web redesign is too little and too late.
Billboard.com currently attracts about 4 million unique visitors each month. Compare that to the conservative Quantcast estimates of MOG at 7.7 million monthly visitors and Imeem at a whopping 16 million monthly uniques. Although it is expected that Billboard will see a traffic spike due to its recent web redesign, it's doubtful that it will increase its numbers to rival those of today's top music communities. We need to remember that while Billboard is still a reputable music industry news source, it is completely irrelevant to cool hunters.
By the time a single reaches Billboard's charts and gets featured for streaming, Hype Machine and Imeem users are more than familiar with them. In fact, they've probably grown bored with the multiple remixes and have decided to form a backlash movement against them. Let's face it, Billboard, Spin and Rolling Stone magazine have become irrelevant to the younger generation of music fans. In fact, Forbes just published a story on how music network Pitchfork is replacing them. And you know if Forbes thinks Pitchfork is the next big thing, then the über hip have already left in droves.
One of Threadless' top selling shirts bares the slogan, "I listen to bands that don't even exist yet." If you're on the bleeding edge of music, you probably want to stick to your favorite music site rather than switching to the bubblegum selection of Billboard's mainstream offerings.
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All of this is very valid criticism. Billboard are clueless, but you do neglect one aspect of their inevitable failure. Much of Billboards traffic comes their editorial which the industry is turning on since it is pro major label. sites like Musformation.com and MusicAlly are beating them with content that matters to people who are not in an ivory tower all day looking at sales charts.
It is also inevitable the print version will soon die. Their once prosperous ad sales now have a magazine with maybe 1-2 full page ads and no classifields section. Their traffic will die instantly once the print form goes down.
Sites like the WikiChart that Musformation syndicates are replacing their charts with what people are really listening to as opposed to the records that very few people are still buying.
Stick a fork in them.
Billboard as a mainstream consumer brand may be doomed, but Billboard's core business is rock-solid. There's no better source for accurate sales and airplay information, and there's no better source for information about the global music industry.
Let's face it, Billboard has always been "irrelevant to the younger generation of music fans". It's irrelevant to most of the older generation. But some of us aren't satisfied just knowing about the new bands and the new trends. We want to understand the industry behind the music, and the infrastructure behind the trends, and Billboard is the most reliable source.
This biggest FAIL on this site is its ridiculously heavy reliance on JavaScript and Ajax, and it's awful SEO. On some of the pages (News!) they don't even use the anchor tags for links - just some wonky JavaScript method that transforms HTML tags to GET via Ajax. Way to go cool guy designer.
That T-Shirt design is an epic fail!
I find it hard to buy an argument about coolness being the savior for driving uniques and success online when you forgot to mention myspace, aolmusic and yahoo music which all operate in the 20MM unique space.
Billboard was never about the bleeding edge of music but about what is popular. And capitalizing on what is popular will always be more profitable then capitalizing on what is not.
Billboard.com won't be a failure because the only people that rely on it for news are the old music industry folk that aren't internet savvy enough to find breaking stories on Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms. They will continue to use the site just as they always have, albeit in a much "prettier" format.
It is nice what they did with the charts, but then again, who really utilizes the charts anyway? Again, unless you work in the music biz, the charts really mean nothing.
I do find it pretty funny that the commenter above was complaining about the site's SEO. Yes, it's pretty awful in that regard, but then again, it's obvious to me that SEO is not important for Billboard. By the time the site is spidered for content, the news story is going to be outdated anyway. You can still find what you're looking for with the site search.
lol its ok Billboard don't fret because of the amateur SEOs who don't know your secrets.
"By the time the site is spidered for content, the news story is going to be outdated anyway."
Huh? Do you know anything about SEO or search in general? Who cares if the content is "outdated"? It sill exists on the site, and I'm sure Billboard's management team would want the site to come up in a search result if someone searched for a keyword - today or in 100 years. Given that the space is filled, not only with direct competitors but amateur bloggers as well, it's imperative that Billboard focus on SEO to grow their user base.
For example, Keith Urban is the top headline as I write this. Do a search for Keith Urban on Google. You get official site, wiki, cmt, imdb, some country blogs, last.fm, newsday, amazon, facebook, yahoo, msn, rhapsody, aol, people, etc. Where is Billboard? Nowhere!
I find it pretty funny that you know nothing about Internet marketing and SEO, yet you find my comment amusing.
"site search" ... how is the user going to use site search if they can't find the site?
Rumor is that Billboard hired iCrossing to do their SEO. That's a group that knows a thing or two about SEO.
Looks like Jesse above works for Musformation.
If you think music-enabled charts are irrelevant, then you think music playlists and music on demand are irrelevant, which as the traffic of imeem and playlist shows, they are not.
SEO is a lot less important to Billboard than other sites, because Billboard's bread-and-butter is their proprietary sales, airplay and other market research data. This data is very detailed, very comprehensive, and very, very expensive. They don't want this data to show up on search engines -- they want you to pay for it!
The design is a hot mess (a writer of mine said that it basically looked like vomit on Safari), but you are all wrong about the Hype Machine userbase being representative of the majority of music listeners; they may be the loudest, but they're not the ones keeping Daughtry at the top of the charts. And Marcello is right on about the paid data being Billboard's real bread and butter. The opening of the Hot 100 and Billboard 200 to everyone is actually the most interesting aspect of this redesign (they're Billboard's two most popular charts, and had been only fully accessible to subscribers until now; opening them up offers users a taste of the rich data that they can have access to if they subscribe), but you guys are so busy trying to convince everyone that you're *so cool* and *so ahead of everyone else* when it comes to downloading the latest MGMT remix or whatever that you're missing the forest for the trees.
(And to the Musformation troll above -- you guys sure do have a lot of people "virally" working comment sections all over the Internet! Maybe you should use some of that energy toward, I dunno, editing the pieces on your site into something resembling coherence?)
Marcello,
It's obvious you completely lack any understanding of the Billboard redesign. The whole point is to create a more user-centric offering that is focused on news and appeals to a wider demo.
Sure they have private data, but that isn't (or shouldn't be) accessible to spiders, so I don't know what you are talking about. I'm talking about simple things like the "News" page and their new offerings that are supposed to appeal to the general public and help gain visibility of the Billboard brand. The Ajax thing is a mess. Again, go to Billboard, look at the news section, run queries in Google, and watch Billboard fail miserably.
best comment above is:
Billboard was never about the bleeding edge of music but about what is popular. And capitalizing on what is popular will always be more profitable then capitalizing on what is not.
true 'dat.
Thanks, anon. I'll pass on your comments to the folks at Billboard. I'm sure they'll alter their strategy immediately.
Billboard is a trade magazine not a consumer vehicle. Big Difference. It couldn't be more different than Pitchfork or some other blog. Nonetheless the new layout sucks.
Billboard never recovered from the passing of editor Timothy White.
Jesse Cannon is a music producer/engineer/mixer and founder of Cannon Found Soundation currently based in Union City, New Jersey. In 2009 he founded and assumed Editorial duties at Musformation.com the first Musicians news and aggregate site.
Billboard.com is 4.7 million uniques per month according to Nielsen Analytics. There are barely 47 people that work in the music industry so I highly doubt that the 4.7 million uniques that go to billboard.com work in music.....
BTW, Timothy did bring alot to Billboard however, it was no secret he loved rock music and barely covered the R&B/Hip Hop genre....
I don't think Billboard is hoping to take visitors from Pitchfork. Billboard, by fucking definition, is interested in popular music. Popular as in the 200 best selling albums. People buying those albums are not on pitchfork. This is a destination for mainstreamers. They'll be fine, its a good mix of services they have put together. Lala is the best music service out right now, allmusic has better reviews (and is more extensive) than any other site out there... now if only we could get some good albums on the billboard chart (Veckatimest w00t).
I own that shirt. Fuck.
Thanks, anon. I'll pass on your comments to the folks at Billboard. I'm sure they'll alter their strategy immediately
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best comment above is:
Billboard was never about the bleeding edge of music but about what is popular. And capitalizing on what is popular will always be more profitable then capitalizing on what is not.