Making The Most Of Your Music Marketing Efforts

How are you marketing your music? Are you only using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace? Don't leave the marketing of your band and your music solely to those who are running these sites.

Look at Myspace already. It's like a ghost town. Every time I visit that site (which is becoming less frequent), I can see tumbleweeds and dust bunnies blowing across my computer screen. I feel bad for those who were (and perhaps still are) using Myspace as their main promotional platform. So much time went into connecting with those 50,000 + 'friends' and maybe even a few hundred bucks pimping up your site and now it's meaningless.

If you think about it, even when Myspace was the place to be, those 50,000 friends didn't really mean much. Most of those people who accepted your friend request probably forgot all about you an hour after they clicked the 'accept' button and you just faded away into the ever growing sea of 'friend' pages.

Instead of putting all your eggs into the social media basket, make sure you have your own official band web site and drive all your traffic there. Be creative and devise a plan for a fun and interactive experience that your fans can get excited about. If they're engaged and entertained, they'll come back again and again and they'll tell their friends about how amazing you are.



Think about the success of Facebook. It isn't because 500 million people think Zuckerberg is a swell guy and love showing him their support by making him billions of dollars selling advertising. It's because he created a web site where the users have the control and it's all about them. They can upload their pictures and videos and connect with or reject anyone they choose.

You have to find a way to create that sense of community within your world. Allow your fans to connect with you and each other. Build a mailing list of qualified fans by meeting with them face to face at your shows and doing a little research to find out exactly where they hang out online. Five hundred email addresses of people who are interested in and expecting updates from you beats 50,000 'friends' any day.

When and if the social networks of today fall into the abyss along with Myspace, you won't be left having to start over again from scratch.