Remember the film of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity? In it, John Cusack pulls out a CD and, turning to his colleagues at Championship Vinyl, soberly states: "I will now sell four copies of The Three EPs by the Beta Band." One 30 second burst of said CD later and, sure enough, customers are bobbing their heads, a queue has formed and the cash register is ringing.

Broadly speaking, this is how music recommendation used to work. A combination of record shop gurus, radio playlists, media taste makers and (perhaps most importantly) mates with cool record collections did most of the groundwork in determining what we, as consumers, would listen to.

Now, of course, in the Long-Tailed bottom-up Web 2.0 world that - allegedly - thrust the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen into the limelight, the old model is supposedly being turned on its head. Certainly, a recent study by the web traffic measurement company Hitwise appears to confirm significant patterns in online consumer behaviour; in particular, that social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo are now established as key vehicles to discovering new music.

The intention of the survey, which tracked the movements of approximately 8.43m UK internet users in the week ending November 18, was to map the UK's online music ecosystem (consisting of some 3,436 websites) and illustrate the interconnectedness between music websites. In a nutshell, it would reveal where music-related traffic was coming from and where it was going to - tracing the complex click flow between major portals such as MySpace, Yahoo! and BBC Radio 1 right out to the peripheries (such as the homepages for Hanson and the McFly bassist, Dougie Poynter).

Influential sites

The resulting network maps are "a bit of a bird's nest", admits Heather Hopkins, Hitwise UK's director of research. But, she adds, "the social network sites, the online music retailers, the lyric sites, the download sites are all part of this music ecosystem. Some sites are obviously more influential than others, but to some extent they all rely on one another."

In fact, the nest could have been messier still. Because Hitwise can only measure traffic travelling between websites, the network maps do not include activity from desktop applications such as iTunes - or, come to think of it, illegal P2P networks - while services classed as online radio stations were also off the radar.

Nevertheless, despite being dominated by Google (a third of all visits to UK music websites start at the world's most popular search engine) the most intriguing aspect of Hitwise's analysis is the data returned from community and chat sites, which accounted for 10.4% of all visits to music websites. Of these, 61% were "downstream" - that is, coming - from MySpace, 10% from Bebo and 4% from YouTube.

In that particular week, Hitwise recognised MySpace Music as the UK's number one music website. "That's the thing that really jumps off - the importance of social networks and how integrated they are into people's activity online in discovering and doing music-related activity," says Hopkins. The other key insight was the informed nature of music consumers' online search processes. "Rather than being driven by links, we're seeing a lot of traffic that's simply from people naturally navigating through the Web."

Gateways to discovery

How revealing such statistics are is perhaps open to question. With music and taste being so completely subjective, discovery and recommendation is a very complicated business, says Tim Grimsditch, strategy director at the music strategy agency Frukt. These days, he says, web-savvy consumers are likely to simply forage for information.

"You'll have a little session on MySpace and either it's fruitful or it's not. If it's not then you'll be off checking the Guardian music site or Channel 4 or whatever. It seems a bit simplistic to say that the order [of importance] is Google and then MySpace and so on." Grimsditch agrees that social networks have become key gateways to music discovery. This should not be viewed as a wholly new phenomenon, but rather an extension of traditional human recommendation relationships. So, instead of mates with cool record collections, users of MySpace and Bebo can access the knowledge of huge volumes of "friends" on a global scale.

"MySpace is interesting because it lets you learn about new bands through the people you like," says Grimsditch. "That's more like social recommendation, as opposed to a direct search. So I think that MySpace probably is quite important, and I know anecdotally of people who do find new bands through using it."

The same basic principles are also evident in the growth of Last.fm, says Martin Stiksel, chief operating officer and cofounder of the service - a social network for music recommendation which can also work as an online radio station. It captures (or "scrobbles") the music played by its 15m users and connects them to others with similar tastes.

"In the real world, you go round to a friend's place and he or she plays you a tune and that's that. You trust their judgment because you know what else they listen to. If you know that some guy is into redneck rock'n'roll and you're into dance, then maybe you won't trust their judgement, but Last.fm will filter those people out."

But it is not only fans who are benefiting from social recommendation. When they're not chasing them through the courts, record labels are also harnessing the power of community sites to propagate marketing campaigns - usually by creating free content that can be embedded into a fan's MySpace or Bebo page, and shared with other users on the network.

A good example was the special Flash video player created for Kasabian's single Shoot The Runner. Hosted on the MySpace pages and blogs of more than 2,000 fans, the players garnered far more views collectively than the band's official website.

For Daniel Ayers, head of digital marketing at Columbia Records, this is simply an acknowledgement that fans are shifting away from artists' websites. "The rationale is that fans don't come to us any more," he says. "They've got their own sites where they want to stay and do their talking."

Having rolled out this strategy across the label, the obvious next step, says Ayers, is to get fans to do the thing the label values - sell content. "We've got all these people acting as ambassadors for our artists and so, in exactly the same way as Amazon has an affiliate sales scheme, we could, theoretically, start putting links to buy whatever the product is into the player. And we then make everyone using them an affiliate and give them a cut."

A variation on this concept of "super-distribution" - where, rather than search for the music, the music will find you - is being trialled by EMI with the recently-launched eListeningpost service. This system allows fans to email "secure" tracks or video to their friends. These can be played up to five times before being forwarded to the next user, with the option of buying directly from the label or artist.

Rumours abound that superdistribution may feature as part of a commission-based strategy for Microsoft's Zune - rewarding those who share content with Zune Marketplace Points.

Of course, while we wait for this viral evolution, the concept of top-down recommendation will not be relegated completely. Indeed, for the cash-rich time-poor consumer, one side effect of having an inbox overloaded with new music may well be a return to more trusted and familiar filters.

Certainly, Nokia's Recommenders service, which collates tips from over 40 independent record shops worldwide, couldn't be more traditional; while, with over 30 years' retail experience and plans to migrate its Album Club subscription service online in 2007, the new MP3 store of Rough Trade records in London has made staff recommendations a key USP.

"We've built our reputation as a destination for introducing new music on the merits of the music alone, and for our ability to pluck out the gems and pass them on," says shop co-director Stephen Godfrey. "We want to bring some of that treasure trove feel, where people come into the shop for one thing, but leave with four things that they've never heard of. That's the authority of recommendations we provide and recognition that people like to discover things in a slightly more human way."

Evidence, perhaps, that nothing beats the personal touch. And while social networks are opening the floodgates to new music, the spirit of Nick Hornby will probably live on for some time yet.

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