I came across this great article called “Booking your band on your Myspace popularity”.
It suggests that bands (especially the smaller and unestablished ones) stop caring about the web 2.0 revolution, take a step back, and concentrate on the grass-roots approach to music, which is to play gigs, distribute fliers, attend other concerts, network and hand out CD’s to acquire “real” fans.
This sounds about right: the number of plays or downloads of your song on Myspace doesn’t equate to tickets and merchandise sold. Gigging is the only way to grow your local fan-base, and promoters adopt a 35/100 rule when it comes to your fans: if you say you can draw 100, you can draw 35 max.
I think that Myspace and other social music platforms become useful when bands use them to support the activities that make up a musician’s work in “real-life”: organizing street teams, promoting shows, collaborating with other musicians and booking gigs. It’s not how many fans you have, it’s the quality of the fans, as well as the ability to get them involved in your activities as a band, that will provide the value to these social networking sites.
Would love to know what you think.
I’ve been saying this for about three years but bands just don’t seem to care or listen!? I get so many emails asking, “Help my band get more MySpace page views”.
Bands can ‘try’ to keep it local by adding other bands of the same genre in the same locale. Try typing this into Google:
site:profile.myspace.com punk london
where punk is Your Genre and london is Your Locale.
One hour of organic, grass-roots, real world, local promotion beats one hour of MySpace ‘networking’ almost all of the time.
luv
ian
XX
some of the bands i have seen on myspace are just plain bad…
[...] the crappiest spot struggling to see them perform. Kind of makes you think about that whole ‘who are my true friends and fans on MySpace‘ debate going on. Bands need both audiences at a show: real fans and random peeps. Actually [...]
[...] MuckWork: Derek Sivers’ personal assistant project for bands The Next Big Sound and the dawn of virtual record labels Music Arsenal: new online band management system Plugging into Plugola: a social network with an affiliate program for fans LP33: the new all-in-one social network for bands and fans SoundCloud: the best way to send and share your projects audio tracks Band Match-Making: Where musicians meet to play How many of your Myspace fans are going to show up at your real gig? [...]