The indie music universe is constantly waning and expanding: new bands emerge, old ones dissolve, conferences come and go, new web sites pop up as older ones fall out of fashion. As with any other industry or business model, these indie music offerings fail and succeed with their ability to create and meet market demand for their service.
Enter MySpace.com. Incorporating successful elements of MP3.com and IUMA, and eclipsing PureVolume and Friendster as the place to be online, MySpace is the epitome of what an online community can be. In it’s short life it has adapted and evolved to meet the evolving needs of its user base, and it has expanded to a network of over 43 million users in the process. Thanks, in large part, to the bands.
Billionaire Boys Club, from Jersey City, NJ, boast the distinction of being the first band ever to grace the front page of MySpace. Through good timing and good tunes, BBC caught the attention of MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson and ushered in a new wrinkle in the MySpace universe. The band is still listed as one of Anderson’s MySpace favorites.
Fireflight, from Orlando, FL, recently signed to Flicker Records, and attribute a lot of their growing fan base to their efforts and presence on MySpace. Through their page on MySpace, the band sees continuous growth and interest, which should only increase as they release their album in July and start playing a full regimen of shows.
We sat down with these two indie music veterans and gleaned some insights into the finer points of MySpace marketing. Here’s our list of five phenomenal reasons to use MySpace!
- Super-targeted viral marketing.
- Communication runs both ways.
- Motivated fans.
- Crossover marketing opportunities.
- Free marketing is the best marketing ever!
One of the tenets of good marketing is to target your market. You wouldn’t pitch your Crunk Speed-Metal band with an ad in Today’s Grandparent magazine. The idea is to figure out who your market is, find out where they are, develop your message, then figure out how to get that message in front of the people who might want to buy what you’re selling.
MySpace delivers this in spades. Pockets and niches of users, called “friends,” gather around each other and share info on bands they like. For instance, let’s say you like My Chemical Romance. You can go check out their site, listen to their music, and read their blog. Then, if you want to find bands with a similar sound, you can check out the band’s friends, which include a host of other bands. Presumably, these are bands that have something in common with My Chemical Romance, so you go and check them out.
There are also fans listed as friends, and they typically have a bunch of bands on their pages. So someone into My Chemical Romance will have a number of other bands posted. You might be interested in checking some of them out. It’s viral marketing in its purest form, and the friend network is what really sets MySpace apart from other band sites.
It’s also why Isac Walter, who does marketing and programming for MySpace, says major labels are clamoring to get their bands on the site. “With 43 million users, it’s almost better than going to TV, what with the way people watch TV nowadays. People come to this site to discover new music, and what better way to expose an artist than to leak a band to this audience?”
As a band, this works the other way, too. Once you start developing a fan base, you can communicate to them when you have a show or a news event to broadcast. MySpace provides a service where you can target the friends you contact by region.
Billionaire Boys Club, from Jersey City, NJ
“They added this feature,” says Leigh Nelson of BBC, “where you can set up an event, and you can say I want to invite all my friends in a radius of x number of miles from this zip code. So we’ll do a show in New York and set up an invitation and invite all of our friends within 50 or 100 miles of the city. So we’re directly targeting that audience, where with email you end up sending show announcements to people in Germany. These are things that get added one little bit at a time. Tom really seems to get how people are using MySpace and what they want to do with it, and they’re always adding functionality based on that.”
Communication Runs Both Ways
The internet has completely changed the way we communicate, particularly in terms of marketing. Take something as simple as a band mailing list, for instance. In the early 90’s, that meant printing post cards, labeling them, putting stamps on them, and lugging it all to the post office weeks before the gig. It sounds like the Dark Ages, doesn’t it? It cost a bunch of money, and fans could only communicate by seeing you at a show or writing a letter. Email changed all that. Now it’s free to email your announcement, fans can immediately reply, and you don’t need to plan your promotion months in advance.
MySpace has taken that even further. MySpace not only allows you to communicate with your fans quickly and cost effectively, but it allows them to communicate with you and each other.
Fans can tell you what they think of everything on your page – a picture, a song, a blog entry – and their response is posted immediately. They can then spread your news to their friends with a couple of keystrokes. It’s an amazing development, and there are many ways to take advantage of it to create drama and stir up a buzz.
Fireflight, from Orlando, FL
“We started leaking the news about our signing to Flicker on MySpace because we knew people were going to be reading our blog,” says Justin Cox of Fireflight, “but we got way more response than we thought we would. That generated more interest in our page than anything had in a long time. You could see us singing a contract but you didn’t know with who, and that blog is the most visited we have. We put it on our regular site, too, but we don’t have it set up where people can comment, so it’s cool to know that so many people were keeping track and were genuinely interested.”
There are examples of bands booking shows to meet the demand of their MySpace fans, tells Walter. “There’s this band Cut Copy from Australia who did the Franz Ferdinand tour, and when they played Los Angeles they had enough people on MySpace saying, ‘Oh I wish you were playing your own show!’ So they booked a show at a smaller club called The Echo and gave discounts to their MySpace friends and sold the place out. Bands like that who keep in contact and get a little more personal with their audience can really have success.”
And Nelson explains that opportunities are coming to them by way of MySpace. “We used to get a decent amount of fan email, but now all those comments are pretty much coming exclusively from MySpace. Also coming in are show offers, booking people who are interested, soundtracks who are interested in songs… a lot of that comes via MySpace. It makes us more likely to follow up, too, because we can get a better idea of who these people are by looking at their page.”
Motivated fans who find you and help promote you
Indie bands need help. It’s a lot of work to do promotion, book gigs, sell merch, rehearse, write, and do the hundreds of little details involved with a band. Street teams and helpful fans have been the solution to much of that, though not always easy to assemble and coordinate. MySpace, with its younger demographic and infectious network qualities, makes it easier to find folks ready to jump on and paint your bandwagon. Sometimes, the band doesn’t even know it happening.
“We have this banner on our MySpace page,” explains Cox. “I was surprised to find that people who were our friends were taking it and posting it on other people’s MySpace pages, trying to drive traffic to us. So let’s say there was no MySpace and you had a web site, and you had that same banner. It’s cool, but what are people going to do with it? Now that we’ve got MySpace, they take those banners and post them as comments on other people’s pages and blogs, and people read the blogs and then automatically they’re going to your site for no other reason than that it’s there.”
Finding where your MySpace fans are coming from can lead to unexpected market research, like expanding your gig radius based on fan input. “I can search for BBC across the whole site and see how many people have added us and said we’re one of their favorite bands,” says Nelson. “It’s really cool to see fans crop up in markets we’ve never even been to. All of a sudden we see there are a lot of friends in upstate New York, we get in touch with them and find out where we should play and then go do some shows. In the past there was no way to find that kind of information.”
Crossover Marketing
At its best, one marketing endeavor feeds another, and spills into your other efforts. As Walter says, “The bands who promote their MySpace pages become the biggest bands on MySpace, hands down.” By linking from your regular web site, adding your MySpace URL to all your stickers, t-shirts, etc., you drive people to your site, and more likely broadcast to all those MySpace users that you’re on there, too.
It also works in reverse. MySpace traffic drives traffic to your regular web site, and people to your shows. “Traffic on our site has increased drastically as well,” says Cox, “and I’m sure that has something to do with MySpace because it’s been a steady ramp since we’ve been on there.
“I can also remember instances specifically where people have come up to me at a show and say they heard us on MySpace and decided to come check us out, which to me is the best. It’s just a big network and a big word of mouth kind of thing and you can’t get that kind of exposure unless you’re playing shows every night. It’s just been this awesome marketing tool.”
Free Marketing is the Best Marketing Ever!
Sounds obvious, and it is! But it can’t be understated or undervalued. Many of the band web sites out there offer great services, and there’s no reason not to be on every site you can get to. MySpace has the unique distinction, though, of offering just about everything you could imagine wanting all under one roof: a potential fan base, an opportunity to broadcast your music, a place to hang your photos, a web presence with a decent amount of customization… the list goes on. Not to mention the features and functions that allow you to be a smart marketer.
“The thing that sets MySpace apart from sites that are just for bands,” touts Nelson, “is people sign onto MySpace every day, just to check their messages, read, and communicate. I use it every day, to check in and see what’s going on, look for any bulletins from bands, figure out what’s going on tonight in the city. So just by putting your journal or show dates or advertisements and songs up there, you’re simply going to get a lot more exposure than people just randomly checking your web site. People spend more time on it than anywhere else. I guess credit to Tom there, for setting it up in such a way that makes it so addictive!”
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