In the meantime, thanks for reminding me I need to get over to some of these other networks and check them out. I’m notorious for not paying enough attention to the social networks that I’m on, except for maybe Twitter, where I just gave away 4 free promo downloads to anyone who messaged me there. Maybe I need to take that show over to one of the other services?

When I first put my tracks online a few years ago, the go to place was obviously myspace — as the other sites either weren’t around or didn’t have traffic. But, things have changed, so I put my music on ilike and last.fm. For successful music distro and fan engagement today, the more sites you place your music on the better! So, why hold back? I have found that I get the most plays on myspace and last.fm, but not so much on Ilike. In terms of Pandora, I couldn’t get my music on there because I had to mail them a CD. THey wouldn’t accept mp3s through email/web. I was pretty shocked by this. They also required the CD to have bar code, which I didn’t have. So, no pandora for me!

Hype Machine is a little different — its music discovery, but not like myspace, last.fm or ilike. You don’t upload your tracks to hype machine, but it aggregates songs from the various MP3 blogs around the web. This is an important differentiating factor to understand in web music promotion!

Clearly Imeem is doing great, and I suspect this because they launched their service by stressing widgets. The playlist widgets are used by many sites, including pitchfork and the listening post, and so they’ve helped validate their name in the market and boost their traffic. Seemingly it was smart to build imeem from the outside in. Partnerships with major labels didn’t hurt either, I imagine.

and they have been flip-flopping on what style the player is which is beyond annoying.

add to it that if the tunes aren’t embedded on another webpage, then users who aren’t logged in only hear 30 second snippets.

They really need to sort that out.