Stuck In Milwaukee

Myspace is by far the best tool out there for getting your band exposure. Some feel that it’s a dying medium, as the internet world moves into web 2.0 and sharing information becomes more relevant than pimping out your profile. However, most people who use the internet for socializing still use Myspace. And Myspace is still the most band-friendly site out of all the social sites. Websites like Twitter and Plurk have no current means of playing MP3s of your music, and you probably just end up using them to post a link to your Myspace anyways.

I have been using Myspace to promote my bands for over three years now, and have seen a lot of success with it. I’ve seen bands use many different tactics and tricks for getting new fans, and few of them are actually effective.

For this post, I want to go over several of the methods that bands use to add friends on Myspace, and how these methods can be effective, ineffective, or a complete waste of time.

1. Random Adding – Probably the biggest waste of time out there. Random adding can involve pretty much anything: adding all of the friends of a friend, adding people who have lots of friends, adding all kinds of bands from different genres, etc.

Promoting your band must involve marketing. And not just marketing, but good marketing. You must realize that most people in the world won’t like your music. You should focus, and find people who will actually like your style.

Good – Raises your friend counter.

Bad – Your friend counter is probably the most insignificant statistic on your Myspace page. If people see that you have 15,000 friends, and 5,000 listens, they’re gonna know that something is up. Yeah, you’ve got friends. But they’re not listening to your music.

2. Random adding in a specific location – You can search for people on Myspace using given parameters such as distance from a specific zip code, age, last log-in, etc.

Good – Raises your friend counter.

Bad – Pretty much as ineffective as random adding, except that people may be more likely to accept your friend request if you’re from their area. That still doesn’t mean that they will listen to, or like, your music.

3. Leaving comments on other bands’ pages – Going to another band’s page and leaving a comment that says, “Hey, if you like these guys, you should check us out!”.

Good – Gets your name out there, and involves much more targeted marketing than random adding. With this technique, you are going after a specific group of people.

Bad – Still extremely ineffective, unless you do it A LOT. Most people don’t really take the time to look at all the comments on a band’s page. It’s also kind of looked down upon to try to use another band’s popularity to raise your own. This technique may get you some fans, but most people will look at your comment with disgust. Especially if you leave a comment like this:

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Completely useless and annoying. Also, with this technique, you’re not actually friend requesting anybody, so you’re not guarantied to get any new friends or fans out of it.

4. Adding all of the friends of a band that is similar to yours – Just go to a popular band’s page, click on “view all friends”, and start adding away.

Good – You’re trying to reach a specific market, and can bump up your friend counter quite a bit. You might even make a few “real” fans. By “real”, I mean people who actually become fans of your music because you added them on Myspace.

Bad – You’re potentially wasting a lot of time with this technique. It takes a long time to add friends, and it doesn’t help you to add all of a bands fake friends (people who just add bands for the heck of it or because they think it’s cool to have a high friend count, or *gasp* want to Spam the band.) You’re also potentially sending out a lot of friend requests to people who haven’t logged on since 2006 or people who just let the friend request sit in their inbox forever.

Here is the method that I find extremely effective, and the one I use most often:

5. Find a band that is similar to your style, and add people who leave comments on their page.

Good – One of the things I like most about this technique is that the comments people leave will tell you a bit about themselves, such as their location or what they like about the music. You can also bypass all the bands leaving ADD ME comments and the Spammers. Also, people who leave comments on their favorite band’s page are truly passionate about music. They go to that band’s page almost everyday to check for new content or fellow fans to chat with.

If your music is good, and a similar style to that band, you can expect a pretty high percentage of friend requests to new fans. This is very targeted marketing, since you’re searching for that niche that not only likes your style of music, but is also happy to tell their friends about the bands they like. Word of mouth is your most valuable and inexpensive form of marketing.

Bad – The only bad thing about this technique is the Myspace age restriction. You can’t add someone under the age of 17 unless you know their last name. This is frustrating because 14-17 is a time when people are more passionate about music than any other age, and Myspace makes it impossible for us to reach them. It’s unfortunate, but we must understand that kids have to be kept safe from on-line predators.

And now, my least favorite method of getting new friends:

6. BOTS! – A bot is software that does all of the work for you. It goes around randomly adding people and running up your profile view and listen counters. All you have to do is buy the software! Or you can pay someone to go around adding people for you.

If you think you can buy fans, just stop reading this blog. Stop. Go to some other blog that doesn’t care if its readers are a bunch of douche bags who don’t want to do any work and care more about looking popular than actually connecting with fans.

There are probably several other methods of friend adding, such as friend trains (which are pretty much dead now.) If you have any other great methods, be sure to leave a comment about it!

Related Posts:
Is Myspace Killing Music?