As we all know, MySpace has gone into a complete music niche. It started as a social network where you could customise your profile to your hearts content, and entertainment started flowing in. Celebrities have fan pages on the service, similar to pages on Facebook. However MySpace noticed that a lot of these celebrities were music based, and that was the social area that was working for the site. Now a new version of MySpace has been released, and it is completely oriented around music.

A company called Zealous knows that to be a musician, you can’t just know other people in that field. You need to be familiar with film makers to get your music video on the go, you need to be in contact with decent photographers who can make your face (and maybe your body) your brand. When you see a picture of a singer, you know who they are afterall. Zealous is a content discovery platform that allows you to not only find music, but also find the services related to it, which you will need to succeed. These different styles are broken down into ‘fields’.

I interviewed James Cook, Marketing Manager for Zealous. I asked him whether or not the focus was on new artists, or to reach out and gather famous artists as a new way for them to gain extra popularity. He said:

We’re aiming for all artists; new artists need the exposure, and established artists are often looking for fresh ideas. We’re not just about big names; we want to push the global creative space, allowing creatives to evolve their work and to collaborate with one another as simply as possible.

Zealous wants to reach out and bring a variety of creativity together into one platform. This will allow collaboration to form not only with people you know locally, but people, and companies, worldwide. This will extend your global reach and allow you easier access to travel to another area of the world.

The service has also worked hard to stay in close contact with the people that use the service. I personally think that this is very important, and I always try to chat with people on Facebook and Twitter when I can when they reply to our social updates. One way Zealous was able to stay close to users was to film a short movie, and have the cast and crew be members of Zealous itself.

Last weekend, we filmed our very first short film, ‘Tech Support’, with some of the cast and crew being users of Zealous that we found through the site. We’ve also been working with local councils and universities to help emerging artists develop their personal brand online.

This allows creative people who want to go into the world of film making to not only gain experience thanks to Zealous, but also gain exposure, tips and a strategy which could help them in the long run.

As mentioned, Zealous focuses on all areas of creativity, and surrounding this, James says that they have four key focuses:

empowering creativity, fostering collaboration, helping people discover the arts, and supporting the creatives themselves.

Finally it was important to understand why Zealous is unique in comparison to other products and services that are already out there, including MySpace itself:

Zealous is unique because of the range of activities that we’re doing to help artists and they’re telling us that they love the site. When people share their work on Zealous, we know we’ve built a great product.

The new MySpace is limited because they are only focusing on music itself. They have already got the attention of famous artists and bands who use the New MySpace to keep fans updated on new content, and perhaps release a teaser or two there first, but when it comes to new artists wanting to reach out and be like the people who inspire them, a service like Zealous will help to make that possible. That is why in the long run, Zealous has a lot more potential to working with individuals and groups who could one day make it to the big time, after benefiting from what Zealous has to offer.

Source: [Zealous]