• by Shankar Gupta , June 6, 2006

Recommendations from friends are one of the best ways for music marketers to introduce consumers to their tracks--ranking below only radio and music videos, according to a Jupiter Research report released Monday.

Marketers can take advantage of the credit given trusted recommendations by promoting their music on social networking sites, the report said. "Music marketers should leverage existing community platforms to recreate the feel of personal recommendations and person-to-person communications," the study stated.

The study, which surveyed 2,427 U.S. online adults as well as 258 "music discoverers"--men and women who state that they are among the first of their friends to discover new music--found that 28 percent of adults overall and 48 percent of discoverers use recommendations from friends as a way to discover new music.

Radio and music videos rated higher--at 79 percent and 29 percent among adults and music discoverers, respectively--but many online outlets fell far short. Only 6 percent of adults said they used online song clips to find new music; online reviews claimed 5 percent, portals 3 percent, and search engines 4 percent.

The study noted that social networking site MySpace drives significantly more traffic than competing portal sites. Taking the hip-hop group The Black-Eyed Peas' Web site as an example, the study found that the band's MySpace profile had been "friended" 285,715 times, compared to the site's Yahoo Music group, which has 63 members, and AOL Music's artist "talk" page, which features only 22 threads dedicated to the group.