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i t ’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. T h r o u g h
good timing and good tunes, BBC caught the attention of MySpace cofounder
Tom Anderson and ushered in a new wrinkle in the MySpace
universe. The band is still listed as one of A n d e r s o n ’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!
1. S u p e r- t a rgeted viral marketing.
2. Communication runs both ways.
3. Motivated fans.
4. Crossover marketing opportunities.
5. Free marketing is the best marketing ever!
Super-targeted viral marketing
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 To d a y ’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.
I t ’s also why Isac Wa l t e r, 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 T V, what with the
way people watch T V 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
a u d i e n c e ? ”
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 off i c e
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 eff e c t i v e l y, 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
i n t e r e s t e d . ”
There are examples of bands booking shows to meet the demand of
their MySpace fans, tells Wa l t e r. “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. A l s o
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
l e t ’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
t h e r e . ”
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
i n f o r m a t i o n . ”
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,
The Indie Bible – 10 th Edition www.indiebible.com