This is the only Myspace that I have, sir (By S.O.F.T)
Oh go on – get your band a myspace page! – even though I personally can’t stand the place – Myspace does remain a valuable, free asset for fan generation and is a great platform to be discovered on! Therefore ll give a quick heads up on the Myspace thing and why you should still use it as one part of your online presence.
In a matter on 20 minutes, we went in and created a very basic myspace presence, and populated it with some music – for the sake of this example, I used the Mixpod widget, but you could use the standard Myspace player, or just about any widget out there that lets you add tracks and then copy and paste the code into a Myspace Html Module.’
There’s plenty of facts and figures out there pointing to the fact that artist based Myspace pages are extremely good “collection points” for fan email addresses, to use for newsletters, etc – so incorporating whatever newsletter service you use into your page is another simple step that you should take. (Don’t have a provider for email newsletters? We like MAILCHIMP ourselves – and they provide easy to copy and paste html code you can insert into a myspace html module)
Also, always bear this in mind – keep that myspace presence clean and simple. There’s limits to what you can actually do with your Social Media presences, whether Myspace or Facebook, or wherever – your personal website is the “VIP” room, it’s your central hub for all your marketing efforts, therefore, wherever possible make sure you have asome way of getting fans to go there, interact, comment on your blog posts, subscribe to your RSS feeds, watch more content, whatever!
Here’s a couple of good looking Myspace pages for your inspiration:
Frightened Rabbit – nice, good links back to their record label, and i’m sure once they get their site up and running (Hey dudes! – you should have come to the Kilted Chaos guys 
, they’ll have link goodness running back to that -the header customization, and banner for the new album really catches the new fans eye and they also have a couple of different subscription options going on – clever lads!
Also – you just got to love the blurb on their page: “You are currently reading about Frightened Rabbit. They are a band who live in Glasgow and have done for some time. They record in bedrooms, cupboards and kitchens. Anyone can be in Frightened Rabbit. They have played some live shows in this city, but want to meet people from other cities, in order that they can come and blow into tubes when they play live. Lets keep pop music alive by getting it out of that dress and into a sweater.”
TYR – Obviously this is an example of just what could be done with a stellar graphic designer and some clever use of the HTML modules. talk about branding: Everything “above the fold” is spot on great images, really grabs your attention and introduces you to the band. Personally I would move the videos up somewhat, they’re kind of way down on the page – but it seems they’re using their Myspace page as their primary marketing vehicle – which, hey, is fine when your’e an established recording artist like they are – but when you’re starting out – you need something more than just Myspace!
Anyway, that’s just a couple of random samples to show what can be done with Myspace. We will be working hard on Drastic Jo’s Myspace page to demonstrate the kind of things outlined in this brief guide, and really show how a talented Indie artist can use MySpace as part of their overall marketing mix, as soon as we finish the page we’ll write a follow up post on it. In the meantime please do feel free to visit Drastic Jo and enjoy her music - wer’e super excited to be working with her on this massive rebranding and expect great things in the coming months from Ms Schneider
