The Music Snob » Social Networks

MySpace Launches MySpace Music and Self-Serve Ad Program

brian — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:55:04 +0000

The talk of the week seems to be the activity at MySpace, what with the launch of MySpace Music and their new self-serve ad platform.

Other sites are reporting on these goings-on much more than I care to, so if you’re interested, check out Hypebot’s by-the-minute MySpace reporting for coverage of the MySpace Music negotiations and the hubbub surrounding indie labels and their fight for a take of the profits.

For some reviews and discussion of the ad service, you can check out:

Shoemoney

CDFNetworks

Ads can only link to MySpace profiles, so that pretty much makes me not interested.

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Getting Your Music Featured on MySpace

brian — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:58:59 +0000

One of the most popular articles on TheMusicSnob.com is Getting Your Band Featured on MySpace, which was posted to the Industry Wiki several months ago. The original article is an excerpt from an ebook by Nick Jag, who runs a site offering marketing tips on social networking sites.

Because things change quickly online, I’m not sure whether these suggestions are still relevant or useful. I wanted to link to the article here and hopefully start some discussion in the comments to see whether anyone has ideas to contribute to the topic.

Essentially, it says that the four ways to get featured are:

Contact Customer Service and ask that your profile be considered
Find a MySpace employee to put in a good word. This can be done via google searches or social networking
A MySpace employee happens to come across your profile and recommends it
You pay money

I’m not sure how practical or effective it is for unknown artists to pursue a MySpace feature, since the competition is probably very stiff. If anyone has thoughts or experience, please share it with us in the Comments…

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Crash on My Couch! Tour Lodging for the Indie Musician

brian — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:00:24 +0000

Finally, a company to serve those of us that wish more strange musicians would sleep on our couches!

Seriously, though, this actually sounds pretty interesting. Better Than The Van has recently introduced a site to connect touring musicians with people willing to let them sleep on their couches. Whether they are daredevils, sickos, or good Samaritans, people are posting profiles and opening their homes to musicians that need a free place to stay.

Better Than The Van looks too new to judge how useful it will be, but I like the idea. What I would really love to see is a site where I could match these willing victims with venues, essentially enabling me to plot out a little tour all from one site. But I guess if things were that easy, everyone would do it.

We posed some questions to Todd, the official “Firestarter” for BTTV. Read the interview below!

How many people have offered their couches up so far (ie registered under “Free couches & floors”)?

Around 100 and growing. We’ve got some opportunities coming through that will increase that number.

Can people put a limit on the number of band members welcome for any given stay?

If they want. They just have to spell that out in their profile.

Can you point to a band or some musicians that have used your site successfully for tour lodging?

A band out of Rhode Island called Troop of Echos hooked up a few places to stay and a couple shows by using BTTV. We’ve been watching the traffic and it looks like a lot of bands are making connections with people and other bands.

What compels a person to randomly open their couch to strangers?

They’ve either done it before or are just curious and want to get involved. If you’ve helped out bands before or work in music it’s a pretty natural thing. If you never have, the unknown is a compelling reason, I guess. Bands, for the most part, are nice people and stay in a lot of random places. They are usually pretty comfortable people to have at your place.

A Couch As Observed in its Natural Habitat

What kinds of people are offering up their couches? Fellow musicians, groupies, drug dealers?

So far it seems like just cool people that want to help out bands. All of us here at BTTV have done our fair share of touring and stayed in all sorts of situations but on the whole most people were very nice and pretty normal. I guess you find what you want to find. If it’s groupies and drugs that you want, you’ll seek that out.

Are people generally willing to have strange guests on a repeated basis, or do you think it’s more of a novelty appeal?

It depends. It’s like anything. Some people may try it out and not be into it, or there are those who really want to get into it and be really involved.

How will your site pay for itself?

We’ve got a whole stack of old Can and Bread records we plan to pawn.

Do you have any more features in the works? Have you considered expanding it to include booking venues near available couches?

In the near future we plan to throw in some kind of map feature and more search options.

What steps should a member take to ensure they are not murdered by a psychopath?

We’ve built in a commenting feature that allows members to vouch for each other. We also ask that members be smart and use their heads. BTTV’s purpose is to be a means of introduction. If they need to, members can usually find out more about a person or a band.

What’s your strategy for getting the word out?

We’re doing a lot of press right now, which is working well to get the word of mouth started. We’ve got a couple other things in the works that should raise our profile in the coming months. It’s exciting times, the response has been great.

Will there be any incentives down the line to encourage members to continue offering their couches?

Probably not.

Have you heard any wild stories resulting from a couch surfing arranged through your site?

Not yet, but we haven’t asked.

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Guilty Pleasures

brian — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:16:19 +0000

In keeping with Friday’s “casual dress policy,” I’m injecting some spontaneity and humor into the mix here. Don’t worry, our cutting and dry editorial style will return on Monday morning.

Goodbye MySpace

I took great joy moments ago in canceling my MySpace account for TheMusicSnob. I wasn’t interested in spending ANY time on their site, and so I wasn’t making any human connections there at all. A total waste of time.

Now I can focus my efforts on composing Twitter haikus about the Olympic games.

You May Already Be Famous in Japan

Have you ever dreamed of achieving super-stardom in Japan? Then go to YouMusic, where foreigners can look at pictures and stare puzzled at Japanese text. Or click on the “English” link to have the site magically transform, and add a profile of your own. I’m curious to see how it’s done on the other side of the world, and will be creating a profile later today. I also want to hear what indie Japanese music sounds like!

Facebook

What I love about Facebook is that it is actually useful. For connecting with people I actually know.

Given that, I’m not sure how useful adding a TheMusicSnob page to my profile will be, but here it is anyway.

Sidenote: It will be great when Google owns EVERY tech company in the world, that way we’ll only have to upload our videos, photos, blog posts, songs, etc. once.

Philadelphia

This weekend I’m leaving the comfort of the quiet Manhattan streets for the big city lights of Philadelphia. Going to see a friend play some live music, hang out, and hopefully gather with some musicians and bang on pots and pans.

If you have any suggestions related to Philly, let’s have them.

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Messaging All Your Fans or Friends on MySpace

brian — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:00:39 +0000

Given how slow and choked with advertising Myspace is, it can take forever just to send one message. They have so many useless features, but still manage to make the most basic ones unpleasant. Since most “friends” don’t share their email addresses, your only hope to convey a message to all your Myspace fans is to use your Twitter-like feed, which may not be adequate for your purposes, or compose messages one by one.

The Online Community Suite

My favorite tool for sending out a ton of messages is the Online Community Suite. This enables you to automate the sending of as many messages as you want. You can leave the program running on your computer while you go off and play a show or take a shower. Whatever. Point being, you compose your message to your “friends,” and that’s it. No more waiting for the pages to load. You don’t even need to have a web browser open, so you never have to look at those shitty ads.

Advantages of Using OCommunity.net

There are usually a few new Ocommunity builds a month, addressing mods to Myspace or fixing certain features
You can either bypass Captcha codes manually or buy credits to have it bypass them for you automatically.
Captcha Bypass Credits are about $0.025 per code. The smallest amount you can buy is 1,000 for $25.
Their support is really good. Unlike a lot of the fly-by-night bot software companies out there, these guys actually respond quickly to any support issues you have. And users can easily generate a log file to send to support for easy troubleshooting.
They sell functionality as modules, and you can buy as many or few as you need. You are entitled to free upgrades, which are frequent.
You can do user and band searches based on geographic location, genre, keywords, etc., which can be very useful if you are trying to identify listeners that might be interested in what you’re doing, or other types of targeting.
You can use Ocommunity for multiple MySpace accounts

Overall
I love this program, because it means that I don’t have to spend a ton of time waiting for Myspace pages to load and looking at their disgusting ads for long periods of time. It helps me target people that might be interested in what I’m doing and is by far the most sophisticated Myspace program I’ve seen.

I’m not sure that going to such lengths to message people on Myspace is all that effective anymore, though. I feel like the whole Myspace thing has been dead for a while. But until I stop using Myspace entirely, I will still be using Ocommunity.net’s Online Community Suite to do the dirty work for me. That leaves me to listen to more music and do actual human things, instead of clicking and waiting, clicking and waiting.

For a very interesting and heated discussion of the pros and cons of actually using programs like these, check out: Should I Use Auto Friend-Adders?

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A Never-Ending List of Music-Related Web Resources

brian — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:01:21 +0000

The popular social networking blog Mashable has a post of 90+ sites and tech tools related to all facets of making and interacting with music. The comments list is a year+ growing spore of new and obscure and interesting plugs for music related sites. Definitely worth browsing, as you are sure to find some music tools that you didn’t know about…

Check it here: http://mashable.com/2007/07/06/online-music/

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Staump.com – A Growing Online Community of Musicians

brian — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:00:07 +0000

We recently interviewed the founder of Staump.com, Tim Staump, to find out more about his site for independent musicians. Staump.com has created a web community of artists that can share their music via download or streams, and offers some interesting features, including:

Aggregation of band materials from YouTube and Flickr.
Tag-based searching / sorting, instead of single-genre music classification
A “site stream,” which shows the latest activities by members. Since the site is in its early stages, now would be a good time to capitalize on this visibility, before the site grows and your share of the spotlight diminishes…
Regular profiles are free, and they are developing PRO accounts that will enable full customization. The example linked to in the interview is pretty sweet…
If you already have external blogs where you write updates on your musical goings-on, you can integrate them with your Staump “stream” so that they are fed to the entire Staump community. Very convenient syndication indeed!

Here are the questions and answers:

What sort of artists and bands (in terms of genre or career stage) do you think can benefit the most from using Staump?

We think anyone of any genre or career stage, who is interested in using the leveraging power of the Internet, will get benefit out of Staump.com. Different approaches to using the site will determine varying returns. In fact, there are quite a few features to the site that we don’t think any one person or band has truly taken complete advantage of yet. We’re not interested in any specific genre or style of music, but are simply fans of music as an art form. We are interested in the industry, the people behind it, and the people who just like to listen. This is why we have eschewed the idea of “genre” listings in favor of a tag based system, so that people may explain themselves a bit more thoroughly. As for the range of career stages on the site, one can find people who are just starting out, to established bands who have been playing for years with record deals, and all those in between.

What are you hoping will motivate bands and artists already on profile-driven networks to add Staump to their online marketing efforts?

Community is a very important thing to artists. What good is creating music if you can’t connect with people who enjoy what you’re doing? To actually use the site isn’t just about creating a profile, it’s about using the tools we provide to connect with those people. Yes, we offer profiles as a fundamental feature, but we don’t think that it is the centerpiece. The real “heart” of the site is the stream. The Sitestream offers a very broad view of the activity on the site, so you can see who is new, the latest song uploads, photos, etc. Each band’s profile page has a stream that shows only their activity, so you can get a more focused view on any particular band. There is also a “Favorites” page that consists of a stream of only the bands and artists that a given user is interested in following. We quickly found the “Favorites” page to be one of the most frequently visited because it lets the user focus on the recent activity of only who they want to keep track of.

What does Staump bring to the online music marketing efforts that other sites don’t?

Our vision for the site is to be an aggregation and community center point for bands and artists. A place to get all the up-to-date information from all over the net in one place, and then talk about it. The idea of status updates and bringing content together hasn’t quite yet hit the mainstream, and the sites that are doing it tend towards a broader, less focused stance, or are comprised mostly of the technology and social media inclined, so they tend to discuss that. What we want to do with Staump.com is take those ideas and give them a specific focus in one place that is perfect for it, and that’s the independent music scene.

Are the aggregation features on the end-user side only, or can artists “push” content to all their other online accounts such as YouTube and Flckr through Staump?

Currently we’re working hard to integrate services that musicians and fans alike are using to help them get their content onto Staump.com easily. But at the same time, we’re also big fans of openness in the social media world, so we’re definitely looking forward to implementing push features, as well as opening our platform under some social media standards like OpenSocial. We’re all about giving as much as we get when it comes to the social media scene.

Are there any insider “tips” for an artist to optimize their use of Staump to help promote their music?

The big thing that we don’t believe people have really picked up on is the streams. Specifically, the fact that you can comment on ANY item that passes through it. Any comment on a Staump specific item, like an uploaded song, a photo, or a blog post also displays the attached comment thread along with the item itself. Items with comments tend to stand out, not only visually, but also because the comments themselves add so much to the content of a given item. A good conversation about a song or a video is bound to get someone’s attention better than just letting the item slip by.

The other major under-used feature of Staump.com is the “permissions” available on a profile. The current climate of profile driven sites that people are used to use a “one person is one band” system. Staump.com, on the other hand, is designed for people from a more modern social media mindset. Member accounts are separated from band profiles so that you can actually add any number of Staump.com members as band members. What’s more, the person who created the band profile can assign permissions to band members to allow them to post to the band blog, upload pictures, modify the profile, etc. This gives people the possibility to turn band profiles into a collaborative effort from everyone in the band. It also means you can assign someone else, to manage your profile, while you actually own it and maintain control of it.

The other upside to separating member accounts from profiles is that any given member can belong to any number of bands, and keep that all tied to a single account. For example, Tim is in two different bands, as well as maintaining his own artist profile, all of which you can see and access from his member page. This lets him keep his identity, and also be active in all three bands at the same time.

How does an artist get coverage on Staump.com’s homepage?

The coverage is pretty subjective. It’s all people that we either really like the music of, or we felt contributed in a major way to the site. We’re looking at some other possibilities to help us make these distinctions, such as chart toppers, as well as more social oriented possibilities, like a “karma” system from social interaction. There’s tons of possibilities.

When did you launch Staump.com?

The original business plan was started in 2004. September 26, 2005 is the date the database was created, but our actual public launch wasn’t until October 31, 2006. The site, as you see it now with the modern feature set, was launched on June 22, 2008 to coincide with our annual Rock the Gaslamp showcase in downtown San Diego.

How many artists have active profiles on Staump?

Right now (July 21, 2008) there are 1260 artist profiles in the database.

Are there any special features in the pipeline that musicians should know about?

Due to popular demand, we just rolled out an introductory streaming audio player that shows up on all song pages. This lets artists choose whether or not they would like to allow downloads of their music, and still show it off either way. We’ll update this player with more features as we go along, as well as provide a configurable external player that people can embed elsewhere.

Even bigger, however, is our plan for “Pro Accounts.” A Pro Account will give people a good deal of major new features. For one, the ability to post embeddable items (like videos, music players, slideshows, etc.) from other sites onto their profile page. And even better, full access to modify the style of their entire profile page to make it look any way they want. You can see an example with the Maria Staump Band profile page at http://www.staump.com/mariastaumpband Musicians are artists, after all, and we understand that presentation of online presence is a big part of what they do and want.

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