The Musician’s Point of View

I’ve interviewed a number of musicians in my time and during every interview, I’ve asked the question, “Do you use MySpace and what are your sentiments?” I’ve listened to the responses, and they’ve been for the most part, uniform. Musicians hate Myspace.

Myspace is dead to me. What it was, was that there was a bunch of other social sites, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and such. The thing with Myspace was that Myspace didn’t stick to its whole form. Myspace didn’t stick to Myspace. Myspace started to try to be like Facebook and Twitter and Youtube… That’s Twitter, and Facebook being such a big social network nowadays and then Myspace started changing things on their format that everybody was like I don’t want to learn new things on Myspace because I liked how it was and you’re gonna change‘em.

– Lil Crazed

Most people I know don’t check Myspace. It’s not dead, it’s on its way out the door. If you look at Myspace it looks really different from what it used to be.

– DJ Neil Armstrong

Totally, absolutely. It’s just a ghost town now. No one goes there. [Myspace] just imploded on themselves. It’s all just advertisements. No one gives a shit and it’s so hard to sit through all the craziness when you go on now.

– Skrillex

So you find your peers forgoing the social networking site. The question you likely have in your mind is, with the obvious benefits of Bandcamp, Facebook and Twitter, and Tumblr (or Blogger and WordPress), what value proposition does Myspace have for musicians?

The Music Critic’s Point of View

New MySpace logo

Let’s take a look at this from a music critic’s perspective discovering musicians. The advantage that Myspace has over competing social networking sites is its crucial renewed partnership with Google.

When I’m interested in a musician by the name of DJ Matter, for example, I immediately type “DJ Matter” or “DJ Matter music” into the Google search query. What the partnership guarantees is that at the top of Google’s search engine results page the musician’s MySpace page (granted that they have created one) will be displayed, which makes finding the musician’s music, tour dates and location, contact information and biography a cinch.

How important is finding this information in a short amount of time? If you’re a musician with an easy to find web presence, you’ve branded yourself in the viewer’s eyes as a legitimate entity.

The Cons Of Competing Social Media Mediums For Discovering Musicians

• Facebook: Musicians using a music player app to feature music on their Facebook page is surprisingly uncommon.
• Bandcamp: Equally rare is the use of Bandcamp among the more established musicians. Add to that, finding a musician’s Bandcamp page requires me to specify a “DJ Matter + Bandcamp” search query because Bandcamp pages are often nowhere to be found on the front page of Google.
• Twitter: I use Twitter to acquaint myself with the personality of the musicians for pre-interview purposes, but listening to a musician’s music isn’t an integrated feature.

Minimal Maintenance Is All You Need

Image credit: humblesound on Flickr

Let’s face it. Myspace is now merely a web based EPK. Connecting with fans and making the crucial connections with industry leaders are for the most part, a whisper of the past and the proof is in the diminishing user base at a rate of 60 million per month. While it’s important to keep in touch with your fan base, Myspace is no longer the venue to do so. Instead, your fans are turning to Facebook or Twitter.

But by leveraging the Myspace and Google partnership, you can keep the potential fans and critics happy by maintaining information that you can make conveniently accessible to visitors searching for the musician and their online presence. At the minimum and maximum, maintain the following categories:

• Music – Keep your band’s tracks updated. It could mean the difference between featuring another band over yours for that day.
• Shows & Events – Update your tours and tour dates. If you’re coming to my city, I would want to request an interview as a preview to your show.
• Bio – This should include positive reviews, band member names, contact information to your manager or publicist, links to your social media presence or website, and a brief background of the band.
• Photos – It doesn’t hurt to make press photos publicly available for use.

Anything else outside of the aforementioned is unnecessary to maintain. Stop by once a week to keep “Last Login” up to date and you’ve maximized Myspace’s utility, while minimizing your time spent on the site.

Francis Bea is a New Yorker turned Chicago co-founder of Musefy.com (in development) and writes Musefy’s blog Musebox.

The question is, how do you get people to find what you’re selling? With millions of bands and musicians worldwide, getting people to find you may seem like hunting for a needle in a haystack. Well, it doesn’t have to be.

On the downside, the odds of your website ranking well for any music related keyword phrase with even remotely decent search volume is pretty much nil. But don’t despair! As a musician looking to make money online, there’s a much better way.

Image credit: adebond on Flickr

First, before you try to sell anything, you need an online presence. This website or profile will be your digital hub, and everything we cover from this point on will point back to this site. If you already have a website, fantastic. If not, you may not actually need one (Editor’s note: better still get your own website at some point).

Step #1 – Create Your Online Hub

No band worth their salt would be without a website, MySpace page and/or a Facebook fan page. If you don’t have at least one of these, create one… now! Next, simply go to BandBox.com and sign up for an account. You get 30-days for free, and then it is either $10 or $15/mo after that.

BandBox.com allows you to upload your music, set a price, and then embed a widget into Facebook, MySpace, your website or blog, or any of a number of other platforms to sell your music digitally. You keep 100% of the profit, deposited to your bank account or PayPal every 30 days. It is the easiest and least expensive way to sell your music digitally online.

Now that you have a digital hub for fans to congregate and a way for them to purchase your music, it’s time to expand your reach. In order for people to buy your music, they first need to know it exists. Creating a local following isn’t challenging, but creating a large enough national or international following to make some serious cash takes a bit more work.

Step #2 – Make Your Music Available to Everyone, Everywhere

Do everything in your power to make your music available on iTunes, Amazon.com, Grooveshark, Pandora, Rdio, Napster, eMusic, Rhapsody, Zune and Last.fm (these links point to submission pages, if available.) You’ll need to get a UPC code for you music to sell it online through some of these venues, and the Indie Artist Alliance is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to do that ($15 per album.)

The easiest way to get your music up on these sites is by using a digital media distribution service such as FineTunes, TuneCore or SongCast.

Some of these sites will sell your music and give you a cut, some won’t, but if your music is available on these 8 sites then you are in front of the vast majority of music listeners throughout the world.

If the platform supports sales and gives you a percentage, make sure all of your music is available there. If the platform doesn’t support sales, or doesn’t give you a cut, only make a limited selection available on that site.

Try not to give all of your best stuff away for free :)

The submission process for some of the sites can be a headache, but it will be worth the effort in the long run. Make sure to optimize the album and track details to reflect the music niche you are most relevant to (Punk, Rock, Ska, Jazz, whatever), as this will make it far easier for people to find your music.

It’s also important to link back to your online hub from each of the sites, if possible.

Step #3 – Create Lots And Lots Of Online Profiles

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube… all of these are excellent resources for musicians. YouTube has helped a number of little known bands achieve notoriety, so remember to have someone record your band whenever you play, preferably in HD, and get those videos up there.

Twitter is another great way to communicate with your fans about upcoming events, and to reach out to new potential fans. It can easily connect to your Facebook fan page, so you don’t need to update multiple platforms.

You might also consider the following musician centric resources:

Reverb Nation

• Unsigned.com
• Bandcamp.com
• Audiolife.com
• Reverbnation.com
• Artistdirect.com
• Soundcloud.com
• Bandmix.com
• Radiosubmit.com
• Cdbaby.com

Each has pros and cons, but if you aren’t familiar with any of these they are worth a look.

It’s important that each time you create one of these profiles that you point it back to your main hub (website, Facebook, etc). This will help to improve the rank-ability of your main page.

Step #4 – Spread The Word

Now that you have a solid hub, have distributed your music and have created your profiles, it’s time to spread the word. Schedule gigs, play venues, enter battle of the bands. Offer to play for free at State and local fairs, events, or any other opportunity to let people hear your music. Charge if you can for events, but don’t be afraid to play for free to help get your sound out here.

Put up cool YouTube videos, Tweet funny things. Do everything in your power to make your band unique in the eyes and ears of your listeners.

And of course ask your fans to help spread the word at every chance you get. Let them know about your Facebook page, Twitter account, and the places where they can listen to and purchase your music.

And that is that. The more music related places online that your band has a presence, the easier it will be to be found. The more places you have your music for sale, the more money you will make.

Sam McRoberts is the CEO of VUDU Marketing, a Utah SEO company. He has been involved with online marketing since 1999 and has worked with hundreds of clients, from small local businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Sam loves all things music, and has sang Acappella at numerous events both public and private.

You’ve always thought outside of the box in terms of presenting 30 Seconds to Mars. Your marketing projects and the different ways you’ve used the Internet really represented new ways of promoting a band. Did you know from the beginning that you were going to use these alternative avenues to publicize the band?

Yes; we tend to look for things that have been tread upon just a little less than others. I think that it’s exciting to do things that haven’t been done so many times before or not at all. And it keeps it interesting for us and I would hope the audience as well. And, uh, it’s a way to deepen the conversation with our audience around the world and to have a stronger connection as well.

Does this harken back to your early days when you were listening to bands and hoping to somehow meet your heroes? Did you ever think, “I’d love to go and meet Jimmy Page or hang out with the Who?”

Photo credit: nicogenin on Flickr

I think for me, some of those bands – whether it was Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or the Who – they certainly had an idea of community that went along with their bands. And I always responded to that. I was always interested in a very active participation from the audience and the bands. We’ve always been really open and engaged with our listeners.

Does that give-and-take with your fans truly inform your music? Or is it more of a social networking type of situation?

It’s definitely informed us; it’s inspired us. And I think the interactivity on This Is War is really a huge part of the album. The Summit that we did, the very first one in Los Angeles, was so encouraging that we ended up doing eight of them around the world. And then eventually a digital version as well.

Can you explain what the Summit is?

For people who don’t know what the Summit is, it was just really a collaboration between our audience and the band. And we invited people to participate and record on the new album. It made a big impact on This Is War.

Where did this Summit interactive material end up on the album?

Yeah, they appear on every single song except for two or three.

Another tactic you undertook was a live chat on MySpace. What were the results of that?

It was inspiring; it was exciting. We enjoyed it a lot and we’ve done it now and I’m not so sure we would repeat that but maybe in a different way we would build upon that idea. It was definitely an interesting thing to do and we learned a lot from it.

If the band had come out back in the days of vinyl, how do you think they might have been perceived? Could 30 Seconds to Mars have created the same musical profile in a pre-Internet world?

Uh, not in the way that we’re doing now. We certainly utilize new technologies and we’re able to further some of these ideas and make these projects work in a way they wouldn’t have been able to in a different age. We’re takin’ full advantage of the digital age here and it’s exciting to use some of the new technologies to help implement creative ideas.

Read the full Steven Rosen‘s interview at UG!

Ten years after Napster tried to make a deal with the record labels to digitally distribute their content, the record labels have found themselves dragged kicking and screaming into the late 90s, offering exactly the same thing Napster proposed. DRM for music has come and gone, having shown that it created hassles and limitations for paying customers while remaining a triviality for infringers. The recording industry’s cry of “we can’t compete with free” has been proven false, with the iTunes Music Store selling billions of dollars of digital music. These sales all happened while P2P traffic remained significant, thereby discrediting the notion that file sharing and digital music purchases are a zero sum game; that an illegal download is a lost sale. In fact, several studies have shown that heavy P2P users are among the biggest music buyers. Consumers have proven that they pay money when there is a good value for their money, even if they have a free alternative.

Napster logo

In fairness to the record companies, it is true that digital download sales have not replaced lost CD sales. But it is unclear to what extent that this is related to piracy. Consumers, especially young ones, have many more forms of media — games, internet, DVDs — jockeying for their attention than at any time before. Perhaps the era of the long form CD has simply run its course.

Much like a doomsday cult’s members have to figure out what to do when their prophecy fails to come true, we are left to envision the future of the music industry now that the bogeymen of technology have failed to materialize. The recording industry is free to innovate without the fears of the past impeding its imagination and vision. Novel distribution models such as blanket site licenses, new relationships between artists and labels such as three-sixty deals, new forms of product packaging such as the iTunes LP are all indications that the music industry has hope for the future.

What will that future look like? Technology has driven down the cost of recording and producing a professional-quality album or single, making the dream of creating music more accessible than ever before. The internet, with social networking, YouTube, and internet radio make marketing and distributing that music equally accessible to aspiring musicians. Without the need for their recording studios or distribution networks, what is the value proposition of the major labels? How will the labels take advantage of these new tools and incorporate them into their businesses?

By Tony Berman. Originally published on M.E.L.O.N. blog. Reposted with a permission.
EAZSSHRUV46B

Then MySpace came along and blew the net apart. It had been around a few years with a modicum of success, but it wasn’t til 2005-06 that it really started to earn its corn. What was different? Well, it had a music player, for a start. That meant that bands could sign up, whack a few demos or samples up there and urls were basic and easily-searchable. The simple page also featured gig dates, release news, contact information, blogs, pictures, video and crucially the ability to add the band as one of your “friends”. Befriending a band meant nailing your colours to the mast; you were not just a fan but a mate, and you could even email the group directly. That removed the record company/webmaster/management barrier in a swathe.

MySpace Music

It reached its peak in 2006, when playcounts were still a reasonably reliable indication of how popular a band was, and before spider programs were set loose to spam as many potential friends as possible. Everyone spent hours on MySpace, adding friends, listening to music, participating. MySpace is a facilitator to bring like-minded people together and people feel incredibly passionate about their favourite acts. You had stories of bands breaking just through MySpace (all untrue, Arctic Monkeys toured their arses off before getting to the top). It was a huge story and it was essentially the first time the music industry as a whole took the internet seriously as a marketing – and sales – tool.

Now, MySpace is clunky, slow, old-fashioned, and usurped by the new kids on the block. And as everyone’s on MySpace (they still are), it’s nigh-impossible to find anything interesting without an hour-on-hour slog. Facebook’s modular customizable functionality was attractive to a net-and-tech-savvy generation, Twitter’s strangely compelling basic 140-character format is used for minute-by-minute updates by everyone from Lady Gaga to Stephen Fry. It is an instant insight into the sharp-sudden thoughts of those who create our music, and as such is somehow more valuable. When Gaga talks of a favourite designer and adds a link, she’s acting as Google for us, as a gatekeeper, an arbiter of taste. We like her style and her music so we trust her judgment.

Whose Space Is It Anyway?

Ultimately, this is what it boils down to: our bands are now performing the same role that once was the highly-guarded one only of A&R and record companies. What this has shown more than anything is that the net is impossible to navigate successfully without trusted guidance. It’s not only musicians getting in on the act, either: things with peer/self-recommending routines like Last.fm and Amazon.com are so useful because, based on our own previous preferences, they make recommendations to us that we’re free to turn down. And as our own preferences develop, so the recommendations are refined, a bit like checking friends of a particular MySpace act to see what else they were listening to.

The exciting and somewhat scary feature about the internet is that it is developing purely based on the requirements of its users, not the other way around. The implications for music are enormous: embrace it, or lose it. Technology is only useful if it is necessary for a human experience, and MySpace was the pioneer of a much wider discussion of which the ripples are still being felt.

Joe Shooman’s “Whose Space Is It Anyway?: An Unofficial Guide to the Sites That Changed the World” is available through Independent Music Press (US Amazon).

Obviously, finding a song of a favorite artist is getting easier than ever. Not only you can listen to a tune with one click directly from a search results page, now you don’t even need to type in the name of the song to find it (you can use a line from the lyrics, for example). A post on the official Google blog lists the smart new search capabilities.

Google search results example

The downsides? First of all, due to the licensing issues some of the songs will only include 30-second samples. Secondly, the service will be rolled out only in the US, so far.

There are surprising advantages though, according to the recent TechCrunch report. The blog reveals that Music Onebox will feature exclusive songs from “a number of well known artists.” Over 20 acts are said to be offering tunes that can only be found through Google search, and some of these tracks will be given away for free.

On the business side of things, Google is not working directly with record labels for licensing, but the company says that the labels approve the new feature, according to DMW . “Everybody’s been very supportive. Indeed, our business model is to improve the search experience with the help of streaming partners, which offer interesting business models of their own,” R.J. Pittman, director of product management for Google, told Reuters.

“Google is the most powerful internet partner that these music services could have,” Michael Nash, Warner Music Group’s executive vice president of digital strategy and business development, told Wired.com. “We think that it’s potentially very significant from the standpoint generating revenue and gives a big boost to legitimate digital music services.”

Now, why should bands that are not among those 20 “well known artists” care? Hypebot just reported that indie artists and labels might be able to control and improve the content of their search results with OneBox.

Says Matt Rosoff on CNet’s Digital Noise:

Eventually, artists will be able to use Lala’s platform to ensure that specific content, such as a new song, shows up in the music search results at Google… (they)  will also be able to work with Lala to sell products other than MP3 downloads through Google’s search results. For example, Lala is working on a deal with Rhino Records where users will be able to buy vinyl Joy Division records directly from Lala.

Interesting? Indeed. In any case, if you are an artist, getting your music to Lala and MySpace seems pretty essential.

By the way, the improved search results will link to bands’ websites as well.

Check out the OneBox in action.

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