Introduction
In my preparation to speak as a panelist at the Philadelphia Future Salon on the topic of music and new media I’ve actually had to formalize some of the pro’s and con’s of the subject matter. It has been an interesting experience to say the least. I have explored various methods of social networking and Web 2.0 applications for music promotion. I can safely say that there is no one sure fire solution or best method, but it does help to know what the pit falls are and how to avoid them and/or deal with them.
The MySpace Band Phenomena
Anyone who has ever used MySpace has gotten numerous friend requests from bands they never heard of all the over world. Some find this an annoyance and others use it as a tool to find new music. Just about every band has some sort of presence on MySpace. What remains to be seen is how difficult it can be for a smaller, independent band to maintain their MySpace page and to affect fan base growth. Setting aside the slow process of sending friend requests to endless droves of potential fans, many of MySpace’s functions are broken or just not optimal for proper use. For instance:
- A band cannot send out an email message to their fans if they have more than 2000 friends. There is, at this time, no way to segment or to send a message by location. You have thousands of people at your fingertips and no way to reach them en masse. Who wants to send 10,000 individual emails manually one at a time?
- The only way to message your “fans” is by posting a bulletin that probably no one will even notice. The new feature to subscribe to friend feeds for status and profile updates is hampered due to restrictions on the number of feeds one can have. That is not even considering the question of whether or not you fan base will use the function to see your updates.
- Bands play gigs all the time. MySpace has an event invitation and listing function. Guess what? It doesn’t work very well. Sure, they tell you that you can invite from your friends list by geographical location, but after a hundred tries you get the same error message. So, if you have the gumption, you can spend days if not weeks going through your friends list and manually sending invites to them.
- While MySpace’s privacy functions were sorely lacking, this has thrown another hindrance into the mix when bands try to send friend requests. There are only so many CAPTCHA’s that one can look at before their eyes go buggy. More and more people do not even accept friend requests from bands. The irony here is that many bands do not accept friend requests from other bands. Oh, the hypocrisy.
This is not to say that bands should steer clear of MySpace or other social networking sites. My advice would be to set realistic goals and expectations of having a presence on MySpace. Setting up shop there does not equal instant success or that you can legitimately claim a fan base of 10,000 just because you have that many friends associated with the page. MySpace should function more like an abstract or one-sheeter where you can find pertinent information on the band and see it all in one concise place.
First, you need to ask yourself a few pertinent questions. “I have 10,000 fans of my music or do I really?” How many of those fans have visited the bands MySpace page and listened to the music more than once on their first visit to the site. Once you are at the level of Snow Patrol and the likes, you probably don’t need to ask this question because your record sales and touring will be enough proof of your measure of success. People will be sending friend requests to you by the thousands, not the other way around. The next question you need to ask is How many of your bands MySpace fans will actually buy a CD, download your music from iTunes (or other site), purchase band related merchandise or attend a concert? Its hard to track vital metrics about the band’s site beyond how many times a song was played or downloaded and how many page views you have. Mind you, you could easy sway this data because every time you look at the page or refresh it, it counts as a page view.
A MySpace page should not be the bands only website. It should supplement the website. It can be beneficial to have both though it depends on what you are hoping to gain. I can’t tell you how many band pages I have looked at where the the website in the profile is listed as “you are looking at it”. While a local booker at a club or bar venue may be thrilled to look at only a MySpace page, however if you are pitching your band to a booking agent or are trying to license your music or find funding, you may not be taken seriously since for all intents and purposes anyone can make a MySpace page. The glut of flashy advertising on them is also a turn off.
It seems like every day some new social networking site is being launched that is not even taking into account how many music services are cropping up all over the place. While MySpace is the most prominent social networking tool for musicians, most other websites have or are developing some sort of music based platform for their product.
Facebook Musician Profiles: Facebook arrived a little late in the game in 2008 to developing a specific type of profile for artists and musicians and they differ greatly from their competitors at MySpace. Most of the ones I see are either made by the artist represented, most likely by their record label or management teams. The rest are made by fans of said musician or artist. I suppose the same is true for other social networking sites. Facebook is often lauded for its approach to preventing spam and obnoxious advertising. This makes it slightly more difficult to seek out fans for a musician profile page. The easiest way to do it is to send a message via Facebook to all your friends and attach the profile. In essence you aren’t sending a “friend request” per se, just a simple message. But, this takes a bit more thought in crafting a pitch so that potential fans will actually look at your profile rather than just deleting the message. Very few attempts at “cold calling” exist in Facebook, I have yet to receive a message for a fan profile request from anyone I did not know. If a music group uses this method of profiling, their numbers might not be as high as they are on MySpace, but you might have a more targeted audience that may just actually come out to a show or listen to the music. In addition the the profiles, you can create a group about the band, though I find that groups are often overlooked in Facebook because their are no notifications of the updates.
Twitter: for those unaware of the phenomena that is Twitter, in a nutshell it is a microblogging site where the premise is “What are you doing right now?” in 140 characters or less. This site can be used as an announcement list of sorts where you can send brief communications to your fan base.
*I never actually finished this post, there are many many music or musician specific social networking sites out there that deserve looking into more in depth.