Music Sites
Check out our very comprehensive collection of music sites, along with commentaries, ratings and descriptions. This is an invaluable guide for anyone seriously researching the online music scene.
It’s all in the Categories sidebar, under “Music & Related Sites“
While most of the stuff there is pretty self-explanatory, here are a few notes regarding some of the more cryptic terms used there:
“General OMD”
General online music distributor, a term not used as much today, but it generally refers to any music site which allows youto upload your profile and songs. Typically an OMD site will have fan voting, sometimes reviews, on-site charts, etc.
Traffic Ranks
Based primarily on Alexa and Statbrain, but also some other resources, this is to give you an indication of the site’s “popularity.” Mind you, not necessarily “quality.” Some “not-so-popular” sites are very influential and have tremendous content, while some extremely popular sites are essentially just store-fronts where your music might well disappear. Another interesting thing to note is the contrast between Alexa rank and daily traffic.
While these figures are estimates, and may not be 100% accurate, they’re “generall” pretty close to the mark. So if you see a site where the Alexa rank is very high but it’s daily traffic relatively low, this might indicate heavy promotional activities which result in boosting the Alexa rank, but haven’t (yet?) translated into daily traffic. In the rare events where the situation is reversed, it might simply indicate an error on part of the tools used to discover this information.
In a “typical” scenario a site which is ranked below 3,000,000 will have small traffic (perhaps up to 200 daily visits – of which most are likely to be by the site’s owners and bots!).
Sites with traffic between 3 and 1,000,000 will typically see around 1000 daily visits.
Sites with ranks below 1,000,000 are where the buzz is, while sites ranked below 100,000 are the potential heavyweights. The top 10,000 sites are in almost all cases huge corporations (althought not always!).
Note also the “Best Alexa Rank To Date” and contrast it with “Alexa Rank Now” – obvioulsy, this tells you something about the organization of the given site and whether they’re having problems or not. Small fluctuations don’t matter at all, but massive drops, say from 100,000 down to 5,000,000 indicate that the site is probably in dire straits. If the two numbers are equal, this means that the site now is about as highly-ranked as it’s ever been.
One more thing to remember – some very small sites might become huge successes in the future. That’s why we’re not limited here to only the biggest and most established ones!
“Influencer”
Some sites will have an “important influencer” comment attached – that’s usually not the biggest sites (although some are), and it’s meant to draw your attention to sites which may have an outwardly small traffic, but wield huge influence behind the scenes. Or are, at the very least, highly regarded in the music community.
UPDATES
We’ve taken care to update all the listings, but this is an ongoing project, so updates are likely to happen here on an almost daily basis. Please feel free to suggest improvements and point out errors! Complete research sheets for our entire dataset will also become available at one point, once we’re confident that they contain totally airtight data.
Your contributions are welcome, including comments and ratings for each site!
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