Promotion: Myspace, Last.fm, hype or the future?
In this tutorial we look at the promotion of your music via social networking sites. Although most of you already have myspace and last.fm accounts these steps might bring some insights and bring to light some overlooked issues. Of course all the tools used in the tutrial are free!
After completing the tutorial you will have:
- A strategy on handling myspace friend requests
- A proffesional Presskit (PDF)
- A Socialization campaign (Digg, Technorati etc)
- Optimized for Last.fm
Community websites like Myspace.com are getting a lot of credit when it comes down to boosting a fan base for new and upcoming artists. But what really comes from having your mp3 played 2000 times a day? who are playing the songs and even better why are they playing the songs?
Amon Tobin’s Player on myspace
Some plays generated on your profile will consist of people who came to your site to spam you or to add you. Of course not all visitors of your profile are lurkers who want to spam their own high school band in your comments section. But don’t get all excited about how many plays you got on a day. Last.fm is more liable source to measure your popularity growth. Hence the fact users of Last.fm downloaded/bought your music and play them in I-tunes or on the site. We’ll get into more details about Last.fm later.
The truth about Myspace
So what is the truth about myspace? Does it help your music career? Well yes and no. Offcourse it can help you with creating a fanbase of Internet listeners. But how many of them buy your record or pay a visit to your gig. Getting your name in the digital world really helps. But in my opinion it will only really help with networking with other musicians or artistic directors of institutions or company’s that can help you. Myspace is not a ticket for success. It does provide you with an easy way to let people find you and let you find other people.
So make some decisions. Are you going to spend hours on end adding “friends” who might accept, but never visit your profile. Or should you look for your peer’s and comment on their profile about their own music or taste in music. As long as it is about them, and not your new CD. Really it does not work. If you commented something personal, you can get away with sending them a message about a gig. Infact they might even appreciate it.
Practically?
Lets look at the steps you need to make to efficiently maintain your myspace profile. First lets see how to go about making a myspce profile? Do you know a fair share of HTML?
Designing a Myspace is not hard at all. You dont need any programming skills what so ever. Use a simple Myspace Profile generator/Editor, like Thomas’ Myspace Editor. All very basic stuff. Remember not make it too fancy, no big pictures that take forever to load. Take a look at your successful peers (similar artists/musicians) for guidance.
Links in my About Me
As You can see In the picture above (highlighted) I link to SC, Fant00m a blog I run and Fokus Records my label obviously. Its important to let people click on images, links and let them read a little about you. If you don’t have a manager (and you don’t or you would not be reading this) who will write blog posts, a bio etc, don’t speak about your self in 3rd person. This comes across as very amateurish and in my opinion very lame. Don’t pretend.
Also note there are lots of blogs out there that post about bands they find on myspace. Make it easy for them to get some info, free mp3’s and picures. Dont put the pictures on your profile (you can upload them to your images directory’s on myspace of course) but bundle everything in a neat looking PDF file (for cross platform support).
You can create PDF files by using the open source alternative for MS Word & Excell; OpenOffice.
Make it easy for people to bookmark you add a button that enables visitors to bookmark you on technorati, Digg, stumble upon etc. Theres a nifty tool called Add This!, sign up for an account on their website and create the HTML code for myspace with a view clicks.
If you have a wordpress, typepad type of blog its useful to start a mailinglist. there are plugins to maintain mailinglists for free. Make a link to the mailinglist subscribe page, on myspace. Better yet make a picture link to the mailinglist!
Alternatively you can manage you mailing list offline with this software
Last.fm and ID3 Tags
Last.fm is being projected as the new music revolution, i went to see what the fuzz was about. Apparently there were 3 profiles with my songs on Last.fm (Thorltd / Thor-Ltd & ThorLtd) So I took a closer look at the structure of Last.fm’s concept and ventured in to the world of scrobbles. Well this meant mayham for me. None of my mp3’s had propper ID3 tagging. Turns out Last.fm reads ID3 metatags to index scrobbles.
Save your selfe the trouble in the future and tag every MP3!Use this powerfull and easy tool to prevent this kind of things. Be sure to add you website, release date etc in the meta tags. Also make sure you donwload your mp3’s from sites where you uploaded any of your songs. Check if the website left the ID3 tags complete.
I really do not know if Last.fm, will be the new thing for independent artists. If you take a closer look at the structure of the concept of last.fm it seems perfect for marketing a band. The whole system is buildt arround the musical taste/preferences of it’s users. Or more scientificaly; its buildt on their user’s playlist history. This means you can single out a targetted group of users who listen to perticular song more then 30 times in 2 weeks. Etc etc. Just recently last.fm started to pay artists for plays generated on last.fm streaming radio stations etc. I have not looked in to this. But like Myspace its not the question; IF you join the “revolution” but HOW you do it.
[edit: ouch! look at the folowing graph]
It looks like I need to rethink this tutorial. Myspace is now the past. Facebook seems to be the new black!
Software & Sources:
