Being with a company that builds websites for musicians, I often have people ask me what I think of MySpace and whether they should have a MySpace page.

NoteWay works with a variety of different bands and musicians, so the answers to these questions will vary depending on your situation. Below are some tips to help you figure out if MySpace is a good fit for you and how it might help to promote your music.

The MySpace Idea

With over 100 million members and growing strong, MySpace has become a very popular option for many musicians and bands to promote themselves. The premise is fairly simple and straightforward. When you create an account on MySpace, you get a single webpage to post information about your band and your music. You also get some basic tools that every musician needs like sound samples, photo galleries, and guestbook comments. The best part is that it is all available for free, provided you don’t mind having a few banner ads on your webpage.

Friends vs. Fans

Probably the single biggest attraction to MySpace is the sheer number of people that are already using it. With millions of visitors everyday, this gives you a chance to expose your music to a huge number of potential music fans.

Visitors can sign up to become your “friends”, which allows them to post guestbook comments about you and receive bulletins and other news from you. Collecting friends is relatively easy, and some bands brag about having thousands of friends on their MySpace page.

But just because you have 1000 friends on MySpace doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve struck it big. There is a huge difference between “friends” and “fans”. Friends are people who will say something nice about your music. Fans are people who will actually spend money on your music. This is usually in the form of buying a copy of your latest CD or paying the cover charge to attend your next gig.

Surprisingly, the tools that MySpace gives you to setup your webpage do not include a way to actually sell your music directly. For this, you have to use other sources besides MySpace (more on this below).

To see how well MySpace will work for you, you must decide what your goals are for your music. If you are trying to gain exposure, then MySpace is a great way to go fishing for a larger audience. But if you are trying to boost your income by selling your music, then there are more effective ways to do this than MySpace alone.

Show Me The Money

Eventually, most bands reach the point where exposure alone is not enough, and they want to see some sort of income from their efforts. If this is your situation, then there are several other options you can pursue besides MySpace to promote your music.

There are many services available nowadays for bands to sell their music online. For example, PlanetCD offers the ability to sell your CDs through its online catalog, and Audio Lunchbox offers the ability to sell MP3 downloads. There are also options like NoteWay’s Do-It-Yourself website service which allow you build your own website and sell your music directly. All of these options have sales tools that MySpace alone cannot offer.

Bringing It All Together

So what do you do if your band is trying to gain exposure, but wants to boost their income along the way? In this case, the best approach is to use a combination of the techniques mentioned above.

This is really a “best of both worlds” approach. It starts by taking advantage of the popularity of MySpace to go fishing for a larger audience. Then once visitors come across your MySpace page, you have a link to direct them to your full website or other webpage where your music is for sale. This effectively allows you to take your MySpace experience to the next level.

If you do decide to have a MySpace page, then I strongly recommend that you also have your own website or store webpage to go along with it. This is becoming a very popular option for many bands, and is one of the most effective ways to convert “friends” into long-term “fans.”

This entry was posted on Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 11:18 am by Jamie Long.

Questions or comments about this article? Are there other topics you would like us to discuss in the future? Please contact us with your suggestions.

Author biography: Jamie Long is Vice President of Sales and Operations at NoteWay Media. At NoteWay, Jamie works directly with customers to stay on top of what they need for their websites.