Advice to Bands on Succeeding On MySpace (and, perhaps, Life)
Introduction
I am a band who actively makes friend invites to MySpace citizens. But I am also a band who does not accept friend invites from fellow bands, for the simple reason that bands have abused my virtual friendship time and time again, and ruined it for the rest of the bands.
Does that mean I don't "support my fellow artists"? No, it means that I don't support bad bands with bad etiquette.
Here are some tips, based on my experience, that may help other bands with a MySpace presence improve their overall quality of life online.
Who am I to write this? Someone who makes a living from selling LLL music and merchandise to my MySpace friends, and I feel it is my "civic duty" to help enrich the "community".
Tips On Succeeding On MySpace Music
No more "hey, check out my music and tell me what you think!"
This is the worst band cliche in the virtual world, and it needs to stop. We all need to find a more personal, compelling way to invite people to hear what we are doing. Apart from it being completely ineffective, it shows a lack of creativity, and when you are an artist creating what needs to be compelling art, you don't want to promote it with hackneyed tactics. If you don't show intelligence and wit in your "elevator pitch", you are only hurting the chances for your music to be heard.
Forget, for now, about getting signed
As you have heard, music sales are down. Labels are closing doors or consolidating, and are risk-averse. There are small labels, but do they have the muscle to promote you better than you can promote yourself? In any case, your sole goal for now is to create great music and promote it as best you can on your own. You will learn a lot by doing so, too. If your music is great, it may eventually get the attention of a label anyway. Remember that as a band you are competing with over a million active bands on MySpace. Your chance of getting signed is, realistically, minuscule -- even if you "rock". If your Plan A is to win the lottery (get signed), then you'd better have a Plan B to keep your life from getting even more miserable, and that Plan B should be creating the music you want, with passion and honesty. And you should start Plan B today.
Don't use friends comment boards as your doormat
Imagine a band lands on your home's doorstep and asks to come in and be your friend. You say sure, and open the door. The band then starts spray-painting your walls with their logo... puts their music video on your TV... and uses your bathroom (without flushing). How long would you keep them in your house? Not long -- unless you're into that kind of thing, ahem.
To me, this is somewhat analogous to spamming a friend's MySpace wall once they have accepted your friend request. Nobody wants to become your billboard. The sooner you get that notion out of your head, the sooner you will have one of the people skills needed to make it in the music business (or indeed, any business at all).
Even death metal bands need to be courteous to succeed.
Don't treat people as marks
Related to the above, people are human beings, and don't like to be thought of as numbers or objects. If you don't see your friends as people, start sensitizing yourself, because otherwise you're going to constantly miss the "mark". If you're going to be an "artist" you need to behave like one, and not like a cold-calling telemarketer.
Don't invite distant friends to your events
My MySpace inbox is clogged with literally tens of thousands of unread "invitations" from bands and their promoters about minor events they will have in distant towns or cities. These messages are not clearly marked as invitations, and there is no way to block invitations (MySpace's bad). After you see a few of these random invites, considering you may live in New York City and the invites may be for a Ramada Inn in Nebraska, or a small club in New Orleans, you either mark them as junk, or delete the band or friend from your friend list. Lazy marketing is bad marketing.
Get used to the "Hollywood No"
In Hollywood, you never know when someone can help you (or hurt you) in the future, so people avoid directly saying "no", which is considered too definitive and confrontational. Instead, they will ignore you. It's the same in music. Don't read anything into the fact that a record label or fellow musician or MySpace user does not reply to your friendly message (or desperate plea). If they don't perceive it to be in their interest, it will be ignored. It's simply business, and not personal. The sooner you understand that, the less grief you will suffer. Just go about your business of making music, and realize that nearly everyone is going to ignore you. All artists throughout history have had to deal with that, so consider yourself to be part of a great tradition. There is nobility in slogging on in the face of resistance, but when you encounter a castle with the gate closed and a moat around it, just go around it and continue on your quest like a musical knight errant; don't end up like Don Quixote, fighting windmills.
No messages to multiple recipients
When I see a MySpace Mail message that is sent to more than just me ("to 53 friends"), I delete it without reading it. If someone cannot take the time to write me personally, why should I take the time to read their broadcast?
Do you suck?
If more people tell you that "you suck" instead of "you rock", you either have the wrong friends, or they are responding to something that is most likely untrue in your music. By "untrue" I mean derivative, trite, or unfelt. There may be technical reasons for their judgment, too (sound quality, musical skill, vocals, poor composition, poor melody), but passion and honesty are, in my opinion, more important than technical prowess. With music, as with any art, you need to find your own "voice", your unique thumbprint. There are too many bands imitating other bands. If you are yourself, people will see that and honor it.
Only put your best songs on your player, and be attentive to their order.
You have people's attention, if you are lucky, for 7 seconds. You need to impress them enough to continue listening. Don't blow it by having a new and untested song as your first song.
There is no "best song"
Different people will like different songs. There is no universally loved song, as far as I know. Music is emotional, and the moment it hits the ears of a listener, it is filtered through their kaleidoscope of perception, which itself is constantly shifting, like sand. So it is inevitable that even if you put your "best song" first, that a certain percentage of people are still not going to like it. Your job is to find the song that alienates the least amount of people, and yet is still representative of your core body of work. And that's what I mean by "testing". You will know by trial and error. As with statistics, the higher the number of the sample, the higher is the reliability of the conclusion you draw from it.
A footnote: I used to have a song on my player called "My Sorrow", which is one of the 25 tracks on our double-CD debut. "My Sorrow" was universally loved -- by all the people who may not love "Buffalo Jump", "Drop Dead Lizzie", and our other "core sounds". None of them were going to buy the double-CD just for that song. Or maybe some would, since some people were obsessed with the song, but it wasn't "representative", so I took it down from the player. I felt that it would be ultimately misleading to have a song, however good, that wasn't representative of the entire repertoire.
Page Clutter
Be careful about what you choose to "stuff" into your page. Some of the items, like videos, widgets, gadgets, and Flash gizmos, force your page to load slower. Don't risk losing people who came to hear your music by forcing them to wait a long time for your page to load. It's bad enough that MySpace's player takes time to load, don't aggravate the situation. (Thanks to R. Lees for pointing out that I had forgotten this point).
Avoid iTunes and similar services
My personal crusade is to prove that musicians (at least LLL) can make a living on CD sales (along with related merchandise) direct to fans, and not have to resort to chopping up cohesive albums into 99 cent chunks (I wrote a manifesto on the topic). But to do that you need to make good albums, with enough songs that are good to make people not feel they are buying 12 songs to get 1 they love. Good albums will always sell themselves, and don't have to be chopped up. There is still an opportunity to make quality music, especially since the industry is pushing everybody to become cogs in their money-making machine (iTunes, etc.), and those who resist should be able to prevail in the long run. And you always have to think in terms of the long run.
Avoid other music services
There are millions of people in music trying to make money, and there are lots of parasites (and other well-intentioned entrepreneurs) who see that number and try to make money off musicians. There are countless services that exist that promise exposure, contacts, plays, friends, critiques, licensing opportunities, you name it... Remember that each of these services exists to make money at your expense. If you know that, and still see a benefit for yourself, then by all means pursue it. Just remember why they exist, and try to understand their "business model" and where your money fits into it. Staying "indie" is also steering clear of all the parasites, remember.
If you made it this far...
Thanks for reading the entire page. It's nice to write more than a "tweet" and have thoughtful people such as yourself spend time reading and thinking about it.
