Music Promotion & Marketing

Promoting Music with MySpace – Networking

Posted on July 29th, 2009 in Music Promotion & Marketing, MySpace, Online Marketing & Promotion, Social Media.
Tags: band promotion, music promotion, MySpace, myspace profile, networking, Social Media

So we’ve covered the basic Myspace features and ensured you make your profile as friendly as possible. Next we can look at networking and getting people to find your profile… and music.

First of all, don’t go ahead adding any random being you come across. It is likely to have any real benefit to you other than making your ‘friends list’ look big. That isn’t necessarily what you want to achieve with your profile.

Instead, network with people that are most likely to pay some attention. Maybe fans of your style of music. Maybe musicians or fans that live in your city, or within a certain distance of your postcode would be a good place to start. These types of friends are more likely to be interested and sense value in your profile and are likely to help you promote it if they are approached in the right way.

Maybe it would be a good idea to find a band similar to your style and analyse their friends. If it looks like they have some good quality, targeted fans there’s no reason why you can’t add them as friends. After all, if they are interested in a band similar to yours, there’s a chance they’ll also like your music. You can then interact with these newfound friends to put your message across.

Myspace has a handy feature that allows you to post messages to all of your friends at the same time. These are called bulletins. Only people on your friends list can see these bulletins and are similar to ‘status updates’ on Facebook, although you can create full messages, not just a few lines.

If you have a new single, gig or download available you can post a bulletin for all of your friends to see. For those friends of yours that have a lot of other friends your bulletin can quite easily get lost among the others. It would be a good idea to repost your bulletin a few times over the course of a few weeks to ensure everyone gets the message, although I wouldn’t recommend ‘spamming’ the system with posts every hour. That’s likely to get you banned quite quickly.

Encourage people to add your track to their player. Once someone does this your track, title and band name will be displayed and played on their profile whenever someone visits it. It also links directly to your profile.

There are endless ways you can get people to add your music to their player and this is something that’s best left to your imagination, although this may make a good future post.

If you communicate regularly with your friends via bulletins and other methods it may be easier to get them to support you, either by adding your new song to their player or by adding you to their top friends list.

This is something else you could do to help promote yourself within Myspace. Do what you can to get people to add you into their ‘top friends’ list. This will potentially allow you to receive more clicks through to your profile and if you have a good image is likely result in quality visitors also landing on your page.

Maybe create a banner to allow fans to add to their page. This would again link directly to your profile and increase awareness within the community of your style, sound and existence.

Why not create a second MySpace profile? A personal one. Maybe all your band members can do the same. Use these profiles to find friends that may potentially be interested in your band – maybe on a local basis – and point them in your band’s direction occasionally.

The idea isn’t to spam – you’ll likely just lose friends, credibility and trust by showing your true, selfish intent. Instead, give interesting or useful information in your bulletins and on your profile. Support people, make friends and interact with comments and emails and generally be helpful by posting links to resources that may help other bands, DJs or musicians (like this blog).

The idea is to be more of a genuine ‘person’, rather than the less personal impression a group of people in band often gives – be a friend. Make sure you come across as genuine and gain trust within the community. Then, when you do drop a bulletin to your friends they are more likely to take notice and follow links to your website or band profile. You can also introduce your friends to other local bands or venues – even bar promotions and is likely to make your friends take notice and keep following your movements.

Something else that may well need a post of its own could be developing a group or community under your personal profile. This would be a great way of attracting fans of your genre and allows you to subtly plug your band occasionally. This also applies to Facebook and can quite easily be implemented with a little time and effort on a regular basis.

I think that’s a good introduction to what can be achieved with Myspace. Although it isn’t a new service by a long shot, there are still some areas that can be utilised in a positive way that you may not be aware of.

I hope this has given you an insight into what can be achieved through marketing your music on MySpace but if you have any other ideas I’d love to hear about them.