Before getting into this post, I’d like to repeat my disclaimer, as MySpace happens to be a client of the company I work for – and I want to be clear that the post below expresses opinions that are mine and mine alone (or… mine, all mine!).
This blog expresses my personal opinions and not the opinions of anyone else… unless they’re being interviewed or I’m summarizing something they said – then it does. I welcome comments and discussions, though do reserve the right to remove offensive or inflammatory comments if necessary.
My blog may come across as slightly sarcastic at times. That’s because I’m slightly sarcastic at times. Again, this is me, not my employer, my family, my friends or my favorite cactus talking.
Now that the disclaimer bit is over, let me explain my thoughts about MySpace and the wider online music world.
Think back to the early 2000′s. As far as social networking goes, it was just a baby. You had Friendster and MySpace, but not much else. As a musician, it made sense to put your efforts into MySpace, as it was quickly gaining popularity and had a very large audience. It was a great place to put press photos, music, information about your band members/your band, tour information, etc.
It had the magic duo – the functionality and the audience.
Jump forward to 2010 and the situation has changed dramatically. I still have a MySpace account and still go there to look at new music and check out what the bands I like are up to, but I’d be lying if I said that I used MySpace as frequently as I used Facebook or Twitter, for example. Some of that is due to my job, as a good part of what I do requires me to pay attention to Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis, but it’s also due to personal preferences; my friends have mainly migrated away from MySpace, so it’s usefuless has gone from a “catch up with everyone”, to a “see new music/catch up with bands”.
Now, MySpace has been taking some great steps recently to fix some of the things that their users were talking about – such as a redesigned look and feel. That’s fabulous, and as a user I really appreciate the change (hey there, MySpace – thanks!).
What does this mean for bands?
It means that your audience is no longer in one central place. If you audience isn’t in one central place, what sense does it make for you to only exist in that “no longer central” place?
Think of it this way.
Let’s say you lived in a small town and you only had one grocery store. Suddenly there was a population boom and 3 more stores opened. If you were selling a product at that one grocery store, wouldn’t you want to get your product into the other new stores? Your former customers could start wanting to go to one of the new stores for any number of reasons, but you still want to get your product in front of them. True? Absolutely.
Diversify
No, this isn’t a post saying that MySpace is useless (it’s still quite useful), and I’m also not telling you delete your band page off of MySpace (keep it!).
This is a post telling you to look beyond the single grocery store.
- Look at places like soundcloud to post your tracks/give your fans the ability to download mixes.
- Look at Facebook to maintain a basic presence for people that use that social network as their first port of call (they do have 500 million users).
- Look at Twitter to chat with your fans and expose your music to potential new fans.
- Look at flavors.me to aggregate all of these outposts onto one central page.
All of these places provide an easy way for you to be found on a Google search, and even if you prefer going to MySpace, it doesn’t really matter if your fans/potential fans don’t.
The best part? They’re all free (like MySpace), and don’t require any knowledge of HTML to set up.
Note: flavors.me does charge $20/year if you want to make your URL bandname.com instead of flavors.me/bandname. You can set it up and keep the original URL for free though.
So – bands/musicians/producers/DJ’s – I’m curious! What do you think? Have you tried any of the above? Did they work for you? Why or why not?