Indie Charts
Sorry about my hiatus. Ms. Musings of the Brain is in town. I did have a look at Indie Charts today. Here are my opinions. Couldn’t find a logo though. Sorry.
Summary
Indie Charts is a resource for unsigned and indie musicians to gain exposure for their music and music videos. The site has a wide range of functionality including mail, instant messages, status, becoming a fan of artists and other fans, reviewing music, photos, bio, comments, and a pop-up player. There are indie battles where bands compete for prominent placement on the website and bulletin boards for discussion. The unmonitored comments, favorites and profile features appear an attempt to mimic MySpace but with the far smaller user base the results are far less meaningful (i.e. artist has 57 friends) and the value of re-creating a profile and network for current MySpace users is very small.
Pros:
- Pop-out music player can be filtered to stream various channels of interest
- Users can rank four categories on others’ profiles: friendly, theme, page layout and color scheme out of five stars
- Lots of unsigned talent
- Good URL, pop-ed up as a targeted Google ad in my Gmail and I was intrigued to click on it
Cons:
- Copyright at the bottom of the site reads 2007 even though they are actively paying for Google adwords
- Banner ads
- Customizable background leads to MySpace-esque layout
- The homepage has too many options: random artist, random featured artist, latest artists and fans, top 25 charts, indie top songs
- No About section
