<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Mountain View-based MusicHawk, a social network for music fans that's been in beta for about 6 months, will publicly announce its 1.0 release in the next few weeks.  However, they've given users a preview of the new stuff today, which includes the ability to track what your friends are doing on the site and find tour schedules for your favorite bands.  For bands, there's now the option to claim your own page.  \nThe first new feature - MyRadar - displays the bands that have been added to your friends' favorites, and also tracks any new connections your friends have made on the network.  Although most social networking users are scared off when \"tracking\" is mentioned (hello Facebook members!), the feature isn't all that invasive.  Meanwhile, the My Tours section displays the tour schedules of your favorite bands for easy reference.  Finally, they're inviting bands and labels to administer their own pages.  Unlike on MySpace Music and Bebo Bands, artists on MusicHawk don't tend to set up their own profiles - instead, fans submit a band for inclusion. Fans can also write the band description, submit relevant links and add news and photos.  But now, thanks to the new \"claiming\" feature, record labels and artists can administer their own pages and add tour schedules, photos, news and more.\nMusicHawk has many of the features you'd expect from a music-themed community - profile pages, networks of friends, messaging, a band search, favorites and list of the most popular and active band pages.  You can add MySpace slideshows, music players, maps and other Flash-based add-ons to your page, with a few limitations - pasting an entire MySpace layout delivers an error, for instance (presumably custom CSS isn't supported).\nWhere the bands have provided them, you can also listen to songs through the Flash player.  Very few bands have done this, however, and it's arguably the biggest problem with MusicHawk: considering that it's a music community, there really isn't all that much music to listen to.  Additionally, there's no way to add these tracks to your own page - the end result is that it feels like a band directory with social networking bolted on, rather than a rich experience.  There are widgets for fans to promote their favorite bands on MySpace, hi5 and blogs, and similar tools for the bands themselves, but once again these suffer from a distinct lack of audio - they're just static images of the band art.  Wouldn't you rather have ProjectOpus' MySpace music player than a few thumbnails?\nMusicHawk is a decent attempt at building a social network around music, but somehow they seem to have forgotten the most important thing: the music itself.  Band directories are fine, but I expect most users would rather listen to the music than read band profiles.  \n\nMusicHawk Band Page\n\nMusicHawk Profile"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/09/28/musichawks-myspace-for-music/>