Why would an artist have a myspace page today...

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Why would an artist have a myspace page today...

Post by fossiltooth » Thu May 19, 2011 1:36 pm

...When they can have a bandcamp, soundcloud, or even wordpress page instead?

Here's a link a friend who knows how I feel about this sent to me recently. I think it states the case pretty well.

http://bit.ly/lGzQFw
Last edited by fossiltooth on Thu May 19, 2011 2:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by chris harris » Thu May 19, 2011 1:39 pm

You'd be amazed at how many people in the industry (mostly related to booking shows) still go to myspace first to check out a band.

I don't even click MySpace links anymore. The bloat always crashes my browser before I even get to hear anything.

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Post by JGriffin » Thu May 19, 2011 1:40 pm

I'm honestly curious, because I'm at a loss to explain why a myspace page makes any sense. I'd love to read about it. But where is the link?
"Jeweller, you've failed. Jeweller."

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Post by fossiltooth » Thu May 19, 2011 2:21 pm

D'oh! Between my typo in my subject line, and the missing link, I'm really on a roll today. I went back and edited the post to include it: http://bit.ly/lGzQFw

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Post by Bro Shark » Thu May 19, 2011 2:27 pm

Yeah but it's a valuable resource for conducting scientific, accurate polling of independent artists and other music industry types.

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Post by plurgid » Thu May 19, 2011 2:27 pm

All the social networking stuff moved to facebook, but facebook's band page capability is complete poo.

What I've found to be a really good (completely free) alternative is to use Blogger to host my page, use dropbox to host my audio files & images, and the facebook plugin to handle comments, likes & social networking aspect.

I'm really surprised that I haven't seen any high profile / up n' coming type bands using this approach. Blogger's template system is really among the most flexible (and non-hacky) I've ever seen ... you could really put up a nice site with it and not necessarily in the blog genre.

My site is here: http://www.hicox.com.

For me, it really is a blog ... just random crap that I happen to be working with at any given time, that I thought was kinda neat. But it's not hard to see how you could extend the approach to make something serious out of it.

Just some food for thought there.

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Post by chris harris » Thu May 19, 2011 2:39 pm

Bro Shark wrote:Yeah but it's a valuable resource for conducting scientific, accurate polling of independent artists and other music industry types.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA HAHAHAHAHAAAAAHAHA!!!

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Post by JGriffin » Thu May 19, 2011 2:40 pm

plurgid wrote:All the social networking stuff moved to facebook, but facebook's band page capability is complete poo.

What I've found to be a really good (completely free) alternative is to use Blogger to host my page, use dropbox to host my audio files & images, and the facebook plugin to handle comments, likes & social networking aspect.

I'm really surprised that I haven't seen any high profile / up n' coming type bands using this approach. Blogger's template system is really among the most flexible (and non-hacky) I've ever seen ... you could really put up a nice site with it and not necessarily in the blog genre.

My site is here: http://www.hicox.com.

For me, it really is a blog ... just random crap that I happen to be working with at any given time, that I thought was kinda neat. But it's not hard to see how you could extend the approach to make something serious out of it.

Just some food for thought there.
Looks good! I take a similar approach, using Wordpress to host the page, and Soundcloud to handle the audio. I don't think I've got it down as well as you have, though.
"Jeweller, you've failed. Jeweller."

"Lots of people are nostalgic for analog. I suspect they're people who never had to work with it." ? Brian Eno

All the DWLB music is at http://dwlb.bandcamp.com/

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Post by chris harris » Thu May 19, 2011 2:44 pm

plurgid wrote:All the social networking stuff moved to facebook, but facebook's band page capability is complete poo.

What I've found to be a really good (completely free) alternative is to use Blogger to host my page, use dropbox to host my audio files & images, and the facebook plugin to handle comments, likes & social networking aspect.
What does the Facebook artist page not offer that those other services do? FB can host your audio/video/pics.

I personally LOVE the way that FB handles artist pages. They have set it up to where fans almost have to come to you organically. The FB interface discourages the kind of random spam bullshit that sent Myspace down the tubes to begin with. I feel like FB's artist facilities are worlds better than Myspace ever was.

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Post by plurgid » Thu May 19, 2011 2:59 pm

subatomic pieces wrote:
plurgid wrote: What does the Facebook artist page not offer that those other services do? FB can host your audio/video/pics.
Granted, it's been about 6 months or so since I really gave the facebook band page thing a ago, so it may have improved. I found the interface, and most of all, the lack of a publicly accessible URL to be maddening.

I also disliked the fact that you have zero ability to customize your band page graphically. Granted, the complete lack of glittery, sparkling animated gifs and auto-playing low-res mp3's and midi files is what has made facebook a success for regular users. For bands and music stuff though ... I find the standard hospital blue & white theme to be a bit ... sterile, I guess. I understand the reasoning for it, though.

I DO like the way that facebook handles the social networking stuff, I'll agree it's a billion times better than the myspace spam engine.

Which really, is why the facebook social plugin is complete genius on the part of facebook. It allows you to plug any site you want right into facebook, really as if it were a page on facebook itself.

Except I could say "go to hicox.com" instead of "go search for plurgid on facebook" (which you can do, if you want to see my frustrated efforts at building a music page there).

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Post by chris harris » Thu May 19, 2011 3:06 pm

Yeah, the URL thing has been addressed. http://www.facebook.com/depthandcurrent

And, the lack of customization features is a pretty obvious benefit to users. In my opinion, customized profiles were another huge contributor to the downfall of MySpace. It slowed everything down DRAMATICALLY.

No band or artist EVER really stood out from the crowd BECAUSE of their MySpace customization. It just cluttered up the site and made it more difficult to get info quickly and easily.

Now, when I hear of a band, I don't even use google. I first try http://www.facebook.com/(bandname) That works 90% of the time. If not, next stop is YouTube.

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Post by JGriffin » Thu May 19, 2011 3:27 pm

subatomic pieces wrote:If not, next stop is YouTube.
Fun fact: behind Google, YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world.
"Jeweller, you've failed. Jeweller."

"Lots of people are nostalgic for analog. I suspect they're people who never had to work with it." ? Brian Eno

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Post by plurgid » Thu May 19, 2011 4:50 pm

Cool! I didn't know about the URL thing. That's a huge improvement.
subatomic pieces wrote: And, the lack of customization features is a pretty obvious benefit to users. In my opinion, customized profiles were another huge contributor to the downfall of MySpace. It slowed everything down DRAMATICALLY.

No band or artist EVER really stood out from the crowd BECAUSE of their MySpace customization. It just cluttered up the site and made it more difficult to get info quickly and easily.
I don't necessarily disagree with you on either point, btw.

The ability to "customize" on myspace was horribly abused.
That being said, it's possible to be tasteful, and sometimes you don't necessarily want to "stand out" but you do want to control how your content is presented.

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Re: Why would an artist have a myspace page today...

Post by @?,*???&? » Mon May 23, 2011 8:22 am

fossiltooth wrote:...When they can have a bandcamp, soundcloud, or even wordpress page instead?

Here's a link a friend who knows how I feel about this sent to me recently. I think it states the case pretty well.

http://bit.ly/lGzQFw
I'll read his bit in a minute, but I would like to state that there was an immediate connection between ordinary folks and bands/musicians on myspace that doesn't exist on another site today. The Facebook treatment of bands makes them little more than names on a page- which is sort of worthless because its about sound and music.

Two thoughts:

1. Myspace should have licensed the music and paid the artist the going rate that Pandora, Last.fm and others do (and this legislation has passed since the demise of myspace) instead of exploiting the bands for free music to generate traffic.

2. Myspace should have had a built-in user app that allowed all users to playlist myspace-only music.

Okay. I read his rant. Pretty unfocused with no support of theory, I disagree based simply on the fact that Bandcamp is not a social networking site.

For his own education, he should peruse the list below. There are alot of sites competing in this domain and yet no one has done what myspace did so well:

www.indaba.com
www.mflow.com
www.rootmusic.com
www.reverbnation.com
www.ourstage.com
www.fairtrade-music.com
www.bandsoup.com
www.topspinmedia.com
www.musweet.com
www.grooveshark.com
www.jamwave.com
www.thesixtyone.com
www.clownbasket.com
www.vampirefreaks.com
www.startmysong.com
www.headliner.fm
www.muchnoise.com
www.numberonemusic.com
www.mixposure.com
www.humblevoice.com
www.smashrabbit.com
www.mp3tunes.com
www.doubletwist.com
www.audiogalaxy.com
www.soundcloud.com
www.artistslike.com
www.unsignedbandweb.com
www.spotify.com
www.amazingtunes.com
www.qtrax.com
www.myspoonful.com
www.fanbridge.com
www.artistdata.com
www.hootsuite.com
www.patronism.com
www.tweetdeck.com
www.stumbleupon.com
www.foursquare.com
www.tumblr.com

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Post by @?,*???&? » Mon May 23, 2011 8:30 am

subatomic pieces wrote:
plurgid wrote:All the social networking stuff moved to facebook, but facebook's band page capability is complete poo.

What I've found to be a really good (completely free) alternative is to use Blogger to host my page, use dropbox to host my audio files & images, and the facebook plugin to handle comments, likes & social networking aspect.
What does the Facebook artist page not offer that those other services do? FB can host your audio/video/pics.
*cough* Can you Facebook fans playlist Facebook bands and do the bands get paid for the streams? *cough*

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