Band-Friendly MySpace In Decline – Can Facebook Pick Up the Slack?
MySpace has been in the news lately – but mostly the news is bad. Massive layoffs have been announced again for the failing social site. In recent months, MySpace has attempted to make upgrades to cater to its remaining users. Bands and musicians in particular were still finding benefit with the site for promoting their music. However, with the large layoffs and the declining user sign-ins, it may signal the need for bands to promote elsewhere.
Facebook may be coming to rescue. A platform called Damntheeradio used to create Facebook fan pages was just picked up by FanBridge. FanBridge is a service that works with musicians to track and touch base with their fans through social media. FanBridge made the acquisition in an effort to break into Facebook as a strong resource for musicians and bands to build name recognition and popularity.
Facebook already has other applications suitable for band promotions. BandPage is a growing app musicians can use for promoting their name, music, and tour dates. To date more that 12.7 million user are active on a monthly basis.
Both companies of the apps have received investor funding and it is becoming apparent that more investors have plans to put more cash where they want music to be – Facebook. The site, already wildly popular around the world, can be an excellent resource for up and coming musicians and bands looking for a fan base since so many users log in daily – even hourly.
Major label artists, including Lil Wayne, are also utilizing Facebook to their fan’s benefit by releasing songs exclusively through their BandPage before they hit the mainstream market through iTunes.
The funny thing about myspace for bands is that it still ranks top for most google searches which means that it’s not time to jump ship just yet.
I think the best plan is to try and move your myspace fans over to an email list, that way you have control and are not always wondering which social network is going to die next.
– Chris
We use MySpace for our band because it’s an industry standard point of contact for promoters now so we have to but all the recent ‘improvements’ – flash type widgets & content etc make it sooo SLOW that we use it the minimum possible. Everything takes so long to do on it and half the time the applets don’t work at all – basic principle, the more complicated something is, the more things there are to go wrong with it. A lot of people have moved/are moving over to mobile broadband – many of them as their main/only net access now and, as it’s slightly slower than the cable/satellite/hardwired kind, MySpace might want to think about that. So many of our fans have told us that they get so frustrated waiting for even the initial band page to load that they just go straight to our Facebook page instead – less fancy maybe but more instant. MySpace is far better geared up for bands with much better options for that specific kind of content but that advantage is totally lost when people have to wait so long to see it. There have been a few of these bandwith-consuming flash type interfaces creeping into Facebook too lately though – hope they have the sense to keep them to a minimum…