Marketing your Music on Myspace, part I |
|---|
March 31st, 2007 Music Promotion, MySpace | |
If you don’t know what MySpace is by now, this is probably your first time using a computer. Their tagline is, “MySpace: A Place for Friends”, and that’s what it is. Before MySpace, it was difficult for the ‘average’ person to make their mark online. This involved them registering for a free website, or even paying for their own, setting it all up, and waiting to see if anybody checked it out. And nobody would. MySpace made it easy for people to have their own website, for free, express themselves with pictures, music, videos, journal entries, keep in touch with friends, make new ones, send emails, and most of all, stalk ex-lovers. Jk.
The same problems existed for bands.
I happen to be a self-proclaimed computer nerd, so setting up my band’s website was for the most part a fun experience. But for the majority of people, registering a domain name, redirecting name-servers to point to a webhost, stringing together lines of code to make a workable mailing list, and dealing with frequent hacker-attacks on our message board (which inevitably took down the site) is not something they want to deal with.
Many bands, even major label bands, use their MySpace account as their primary ‘home’ on the web. Of course it is still recommended to at least have a domain name of your band, i.e. “X-band.com”, simply to claim that name and to redirect any traffic to your MySpace page. Of course, on your own hosted website, you have the freedom to express your band’s flavor in anyway you want…just check out Radiohead.com. but MySpace fills most of the basic needs for artists these days. If you don’t have a MySpace account yet, get one. You can upload a few of your tracks, pictures of the band, bio, blog, keep in touch with fans, and (the main point of this article) make new ones!
With MySpace it’s easy to find and add new potential fans. But some artists go about it completely wrong. Theoretically, you could simply click on every person on MySpace and ask them to be your friend. This is called, “adding friends”. I call that the Shotgun approach to marketing; you’re basically just blasting out effort in every direction and hoping it hits the right targets. It’s a serious waste of time; you will probably piss off a bunch of people while you’re at it, and worst of all you will burn yourself out. There must be a method to the madness. Let’s look at the right way for a band to utilize the power of MySpace…
The Right Approach to Marketing on MySpace:
Ok, so there are millions upon millions of people connected to MySpace. Great. What does that mean for your music? It would mean nothing if you couldn’t pick out who the potential fans are. Using the Shotgun approach and just adding anybody and everybody is equivalent to passing out flyers to random people at, say, a crowded Mall. Untargeted = waste of time. The beauty of MySpace is that you CAN scope out your fans, very intuitively I might add. You can basically search the gigantic database for people on a multitude of criteria; their age, sex, location, school, work, interests, group association…it goes on and on. So as an up-and-coming artist or band, what is the best strategy for finding your fans?
Location, location, location:
First thing I want to stress is location. If you’re going to spend 10 hours a week adding friends on MySpace for your music, make that 10 hours worthwhile. There is no point in adding friends in California if you live and gig in Massachusetts . This goes back to my theory about Communities…MySpace is a community which gives you access to other communities. Perhaps you have read my article on Building your Fanbase with Communities!
Anyway, start from a center location. Add people from your town, your city, and then your state. This is your Home Base. The probability of these people turning from “e-fans” to real fans is much higher than somebody 3,000 miles away. Your goal is to find them, alert them of your presence in their community, and hope to excite them about your music. Everybody loves a home-town hero, and by starting small and focused, you can be that hero (if your music doesn’t suck).
Age & Interests:
The other main component besides location is age. If you play classic rock which appeals mostly to men and women over the age of 40, don’t waste your time asking 18 year old girls to be your ‘friend’. Utilize MySpace’s advanced search feature and focus your searches to your prime listening age group. Is this starting to make sense?
You can even go a step further and search for people within those criteria who also list a certain ‘artist’ under their interests. This is a great way to avoid receiving messages from some hip-hop lovin’ diva saying that your Alternative Rock band should go choke yourselves on barbwire. If they like Blink 182, and you sound like them, bingo…you are marketing efficiently.
Ok, so you’ve find the perfect group of people in your City. MySpace says there are 1500 of them that fall into your target demographic. Great! Want to hear the Right thing to do now? You might….
Personalizing your Messages to Potential Fans:
There is nothing people hate more than receiving a generic message that they KNOW was mass-mailed to thousands of other suckers. Don’t do that to your fans!!! I repeat, DON’T SPAM POTENTIAL FANS WITH GENERIC MESSAGES! Bands and companies do that all the time to save time and money, and in fact, highly personalized messages are not always required. But for an initial first contact, Personal is the only thing that works.
It’s like that fake chat robot on AOL Instant Messenger. The people who created that got it right. The first message you receive from it is actually a highly personalized message from one of your friends (the person pulling the prank), and the rest of the messages are bland and generic. But it’s that first message which makes you feel special…special enough to keep listening. Use this same procedure when adding friends for the first time on MySpace. It takes way longer, for sure, but the effort can really pay off. The more personal the message, the better…it doesn’t even have to be that long. Just a little something from one real person to another.
Use their name. Mention how you guys are connected (live in the same town, like the same music, went to the same school, etc.) Devote a few hours a week on this if possible, and slowly but surely your MySpace fan base will add up with “Quality leads”, as we call it in the business world.
Conclusion:
What I’ve explained here is the right way to ‘add’ friends on MySpace for your music. The next step is nourishing that relationship once it’s already established. There are good practices for that as well on MySpace, and for my next article I will go into detail on it. Thanks for reading and good luck!
