I love seeing how different niche sites have grown, adopted a particular segment of target customers on the web and elevated them to a new level. You can see this happening in a number of different industries: doctors, architects, even dog-walkers. It’s been a long time since the Web was just the domain of techies.
The thought comes from looking at Dierks Bentley‘s page on IdolMe. Dierks is a country and western singer with a number of singles. He has always been into country music and is actually a self-taught artist (I have a high respect for people who have the passion required to teach themselves a new skill). His work includes titles including:
- That Don’t Make It Easy Loving Me
- Soon As You Can
- Trying To Stop You Leaving
- Hope For Me Yet
- The Heaven I’m Headed To
- Train Travelin’ (with The Del McCoury Band)
- Wish It Would Break
- I Can Only Think Of One
- Is Anybody Loving You These Days
- My Love Will Follow You
- How Am I Doin’
There’s quite a few more, but you can pop onto the site have a look. And there’s a video you can watch of him performing to get an idea of what he’s like. The only thing missing from the site is probably a link to iTunes where you could actually buy his tracks if you wanted to.
The IdolMe website is interesting in some ways. It’s actually a forum for people to discuss music, television, with particular emphasis on American Idol, but there’s also a section devoted to different artists. Each artist page has a biography of the artist, some titles they perform and a video of the artist’s work. So it’s relatively simple effort for some one like Dierks above to set up a page and get more people talking about him. It’s great how versatile the web is, isn’t it ?