Dreamseekers

Drivers,
Welcome to 2012. It's a new year, and as we continue to move forward the landscape of the entertainment industry will always shift and change as new developments and services become available. Recently, I read an article published on SESAC discussing the launch of a service called "Dreamseekers". This service which will come from a partnership between Myspace and Billboard will offer artists the chance to get "discovered". Through this subscription based service costing about $100 a year, artists will be able to upload music as well as gather analytics on their various social networks, blogs, airplay, and sales. These subsequent results will be published in a "Dreamseekers" chart that will be featured in Billboard. 

Is Dreakseekers worth the price? Personally, I don't feel it offers much besides the chart that they will be featuring in Billboard. There are currently numerous websites and services that track analytics the same way for far less and in some cases for free. Furthermore, in the past few years Billboard has fallen victim to decreasing subscribers and major losses in terms of revenue. To make matters worse, the other partner in this service is Myspace which has over the last few years become as outdated as the Eight-Track. With the public launch of other social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Myspace quickly became obsolete. Even as this shift occurred I as well as many others continued using Myspace as a platform for music that was until a few years ago. As more and more users switched over from Myspace to Facebook and Twitter, the idea of using Myspace became a thing of the past. Since switching over, I have never felt more connected to my audience. In addition, Myspace is completely flooded with spam and bots that make the social network more of an aggravation than a thing of enjoyment.Dreamseekers is certainly a great thing in the aspect that it utilizes all the analytics to promote undiscovered artists on a chart that will be featured in Billboard. For the time being, Billboard continues to be the primary source consumers and industry professionals alike use to monitor success based upon mainstream charts. The thought of paying $100 or so a year to have the "possibility" of rating high enough to be featured on the chart may be good, but its only a possibility. If millions of artists utilize this service it becomes extremely unlikely that all these artists will be featured. To conclude this entry, I'd like to say for some this service may be good and extremely beneficial but for the majority of artists I'd say it seems foolish to utilize a service that can be attained cheaper and in some cases free.-Marshal

 Montgomery Drive