Kiwein

The following text is a personal blog entry, done by me and me only. Since we’re a blog and not a news page, there’s some editorial going on from time to time. This text is not necessarily the opinion of my fellow Roxettebloggers. So if you want to bash us for getting a life, a new hobby or stop complaining and whining: address your comment to me, and me only, please.

MySpace is dead, long live MySpace. I never liked that platform very much. Much too messy, too many designs which make you close the site before you had a close look at the content, comments everywhere, images without further comments in all sizes and forms everywhere on the page and at the top of the page on the right a small box with audio or video files. This was the only reason to visit a MySpace page in my opinion: to get to know an artist by listening to his songs or watching his clips and afterwards to decide if it’s worth to buy a whole CD or just a song or nothing. The only problem for the artist was that he didn’t earn anything with having a MySpace site. All he got was the chance to provide his music and stuff and to find more fans – but still: no money.

Now we got a fish in the snow and this fish wants to change that. The concept is called “Snowfish” and comes from Sweden. It’s actually a bit like MySpace, artists, musicians and every fan can register a site, upload images, include a Twitter feed and offer videos to watch. This site isn’t as messy as MySpace, but still it’s everything you would file in “chaos”. There’s a beta version online already since last year’s summer and still there are so many bugs on this page, that you don’t feel a second like visiting this page. Ok, I must admit – the structure of this page is slightly better than it was on MySpace and yet there’s another reason this site is different to MySpace: the artists can earn money with it. The more traffic you have on your page the more money you earn. So it’s said on the Snowfish homepage:

At Snowfish, every single view, listen or read of your content earns you payment (50% of advertising income received from your traffic!). These payments may be small at first (pennies) but ultimately pennies add up!

So it’s obvious that it can’t be much the artists actually get, but for those, who are not famous, not rich or just too bad and need every Cent, Dollar or Euro it’s a concept which can be profitable as time goes by. The more traffic, the more money.

But now it really would be nice, if the creators of this page would work on it which means: make it less messy, make it more user-friendly. So far this is not the case. Best example for this is Per Gessle’s new Snowfish page. He’s uploading videos and pictures from the recording sessions of the new Roxette album these days. And when we take a close look at the front page of his site it looks like there’s 22 videos to watch so far:

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