To Bebo Or Not To Bebo

The buzz of the day is that Yahoo! wants to buy the massively popular social networking site Bebo. Partly due to its enormous popularity in Britain, this is seen by many as the main rival to MySpace, which has already demonstrated its worth as a music promotion tool. Acquiring Bebo could be seen as an attempt to keep pace with the viral success of such sites as Facebook and YouTube. Although Yahoo! Answers has been quite successful, it doesn’t have the ubiquitous presence of a behemoth like YouTube (bought by Google last year). Perhaps the 25 million Bebo users would tip the balance somewhat back in Yahoo’s favour…

In other Yahoo-related news, Jason Fry bemoans the lack of a copy facility on the new Yahoo/Gracenote song lyrics feature in Yahoo! Music. As the system displays song lyrics as images, it is not possible to copy the lyrics and paste them into (for example) the metadata of an mp3. The implications of the new lyric streaming for the Mondegreen have been discussed previously…

Getcha features a useful post about social media type OMD sites, listing a few places that have taken an interesting angle on promoting independent music. Of particular interest here is Disk Revolt, which allows artists to design physical cards which can be redeemed for music downloads. The cards feature a code which, when entered on the site, give the fan access to a specified download. The cards themselves are made from plastic and can be sold (or given away) at concerts or other events. If you sign up now, you get 20 free cards – this includes free shipping if you live in the USA. If you are living elsewhere, you can contact them to sort out a shipping fee. This is well worth checking out – as well as giving fans a chance to hear your music, you also gain invaluable targeted traffic to your bio page.