Social Media Feed – Postings on social media such as Facebook, Twitter etc.

Virtual Worlds & Gaming Feed – Postings about activities within Second Life, World of Warcraft and other online virtual worlds and games.

Health & Fitness Feed – Postings about my journeys through diet and exercise dealing with Weight Watchers and yoga primarily.

Philadelphia Local Feed – Postings having to do with Philadelphia or events taking place in Philadelphia

Music Feed – Postings often deal with music and new media, local music stuff and events.

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.

But without further adoo, Manic Mirrors is performing their first show on March 18th at the Barbary in Philadelphia.

Here is the event information:

Being a musician in the modern era has offered a huge wealth of tools
and opportunities, however, this can also be overwhelming. The same
thing can be said for the modern media business: how do you promote
yourselves in a vast sea of competition? Which tools are effective?
How do you separate your work from the pack? What artists and
businesses have been successful?

And, of course, the most important question: how can I get people to
listen to music, while still having an opportunity to make a living,
and maintaining the quality of my work?

We will be addressing these questions – and many more, hopefully
brought by you. Our panelists include:

John Allers: program director Radio 104.5 WRFF-FM – or better known to
us, the best local supporter of local artists, Clear Channel
Jennifer Vatza: local band manager; new media promoter, Web 2.0
socializer; virtual worlds expert
Darren Morze: local musician (Manic Mirrors) and studio engineer (Plan
B Studios) in both analog and digital
Ben Morgan: Music Director, Millcreek Tavern; Founder, Musictech
mailing list; Past associate of The Future of Music Coalition, Elektra
Records, CDnow

As usual, we will be having a fairly open discussion with the
panelists, not a lecture. We hope to see you Thursday, March 6th,
at our meeting location:

1835 Market Street
14th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19103

To attend, simply drop an email to Frank Taney, our kind sponsor from
Buchanan Ingersoll, & Rooney – francis(d0t)taney(at)bipc(dot)com – if you don’t
have time to register, feel free to show up, but you may have to wait
a few minutes while the front desk contacts us.

We always gather between 5:30pm and 6:00pm EST, and start at about
6:15pm. We’ll have the discussion until about 8pm, and people who want
to join us for a cocktail afterwards at Elephant & Castle at 18th and
Market are welcome.

And in other Trouble Everyday news, we set up the band profile on I Like.com, which also has a Facebook application so you can listen to both their albums,  add songs to your Facebook/I Like profile and other stuff.  Personally speaking, as someone always on the lookout for new music, I’ve really been digging I Like a lot lately.

Mercury Radio Theater kicked off the show just after 9pm. This was the first time I had seen them. Their sponsor a zombie program was an intriguing aspect of their performance. Who doesn’t love zombies? I was surprised to see how any people showed up for the first act. I figured following Philly tradition that people would show up late and/or miss the opening act. I was happy to be proven wrong. The Vandelles performed a short second opening set. Their sound is like an odd fusion of Velvet Underground and Joy Division with that indy NYC edge. Wharton Tract closed out the night with an amazing blues performance that had the crowds cheering and dancing the night away.

Trouble Everyday played just before A Place to Bury Strangers to a packed room, the floor was a bouncing, cute college girls dancing up front and the crowd really was into them. They performed two new songs with an intense shoegazey influence. Trouble Everyday’s sound was the perfect intro to APTBS in volume and intensity. There will be some video footage forthcoming.

A Place to Bury Strangers purported to be “the loudest band in NYC” did not fail in their promise to deliver a performance of epic volume and surreal imagery. As a side note, I’m noticing that more and more bands seem to be incorporating multimedia elements into their performances. APTBS did an amazing job layering imagery from two old film projectors. The images coupled with the darkness and ambiance of the smoke machine created an immersive environment for the show.

Here are a few pictures I took during the Trouble Everyday show.

As it should come as no surprise to anyone that knows me, I am still on a long term hiatus from Second Life. I’ve logged in a couple times over the past month or so. I usually get frustrated by the poor performance issues and promptly log back out without a second thought. It makes me sad to feel such apathy and contempt for something I once loved so much. I thought at first that I was just sick of the drama that stormed through our virtual lives year after year, but I think it runs deeper than that now. I had always been a big supporter of Linden Lab and Second Life. It just got to the point where I could no longer make excuses for a product that barely works on a good day. I just hope that I haven’t become disenfranchised to the point of not ever coming back and/or completely removing my business interests from Second Life.

While on the subject of Second Life, I’d like to extend a belated congratulations to Daniel Terdiman on the pending release of The Entepreneur’s Guide to Second Life. Upon speaking at the Virtuals Worlds Conference in NYC back in March, he asked me to contribute some knowledge and insight on fashion design and content creation in Second Life. On a side note, whilst Google searching my avatar, I see that while I am wholly un-present in Second Life and most Second Life related forums and blogs, that a certain bag lady blogger still has me in her cross hairs questioning how I could possibly contribute anything on content creation since I’ve like never rezzed a prim. For anyone interested, I became a content creator around May 2004 and regularly released new items up until this past year. My main store is in Indigo and I have owned and managed several other malls and boutique locations around Second Life since August 2004.

I am still playing World of Warcraft because tried and true it works and critical functions don’t break after updates. The “lag” when noticeable in capitol cities is almost laughable compared to the walking through molasses lag at any given time in Second Life. It has been a fun experience since I have never been into online games like this before. I am always amazed by the intuitiveness of the User Interface and just how smooth and beautiful the world is at any given time. Sure, it does not have streamed content like Second Life, but I’d sacrifice streamed content in order to never see Missing Image again.

And in other news, I began managing a friends band last month, Trouble Everyday, whom as you may remember performed a show in Second Life back in June hosted by Phreak Radio. I have been enjoying it immensely and life again. I think after nearly four years of being involved in virtual world stuff I just needed to do something real and tangible again,  eventhough we are focusing on interaction with various new media outlets. I’ll be writing more about my adventures on this blog soon enough. I just need to transition it from being 100% Second Life related to being a mix of new media, music and personal stuff.