Online profile management
I’ve sometimes struggled with how many profiles to manage as part of my online musical presence. I still don’t have the answer. I do know that there are too many places online where you can go somewhere and be part of a ‘community’ and none of them have really resonated with me.
There’s MySpace, still the best website on the ‘Net that I use to discover new music. It’s not exactly a place for making friends and for a long time now it’s been a bunch of people marketing to each other. So you probably won’t sell anything to anyone through MySpace.
But the key to the whole premise is the fact that the player launches the minute you land on a page.
That specific act of being able to passively discover music without having to launch a separate player is the crucial key to MySpace’s success and a powerful model. You’re not locked into an artist’s site. You don’t feel psychologically trapped in the same way that you do when a player launches on a home page. You feel like you’re grazing. It’s a useful experience and I know that most musicians I know are listening to what I’m doing through MySpace.
There’s of course, Facebook. But the interface doesn’t have that same viral quality that I identify with MySpace. I’m not sure why. It just feels more static. Maybe because most bands aren’t doing as much (yet) with their Facebook profiles. Still, that’s where the young people are and I’m sure the Facebook people will be working hard to continue to embed video and audio in compelling ways that will make Facebook a continued home for most artists. Password protection is also a big deal since it hampers SEO and makes an artist’s Facebook profile (at least for now) explicitly less of a public offering than MySpace where, again, the dynamics lead to better grazing.
Kudos to Sonicbids for creating a platform where I feel, whether I like it or not, that I have to have a profile to appear valid and substantial. So I have a presence there although, again, not too much has happened except that I’ve paid to submit my EPK to publications and websites that would accept my physical CD for free. I suppose it’s about the same as the cost of postage. But yes, I need to have a presence on Sonicbids, even if I don’t feel like Panos’ artistic middle class is imminent.
After that, and assuming you’re selling your stuff through CD Baby or Tunecore, nothing else is really jumping out at me as crucial at this point. I have a profile on Mog and hoped that there was a better community through Mog than through MySpace. Less marketing and more connection. But nothing has ever really come of it (at least for me). And you can tell that the information hasn’t been maintained very well.
I know I need to have a last.fm profile and I’m sure I need to create a presence on iLike. And I spent some time on Garageband (the website not the program) when I first got going to get some music geeks to listen and critique the work. Plus, it’s not too difficult to get a a Song of the Day or Week or something in a micro-genre where there’s not too much traffic.
But the problem is that you need traffic to make managing a presence worthwhile. Unless you have infinite time to manage dozens of different profiles and to update all of those profiles with new songs, new pictures, new video and new musings on the state of the music industry. Assuming there was no opportunity cost to my time, that might be feasible.
But there is and it’s not.
To do this well you either need a personal profile manager to distribute across all of these different platforms (which doesn’t exist) or you need to spend time reposting everything across your online presence in hopes of capturing a few extra visitors. You can take two different approaches, again assuming you have limited time:
1. You can distribute less content across a broader platform OR
2. You can work hard to create more interesting content across a more focused platform
Only because I find it more interesting, I choose 2. And also because the value of a few extra pieces of traffic is outweighed by the investment I’d make to maintain these profiles. So I find myself defaulting to spending the most amount of time on my own website, some time on MySpace, some time on Sonicbids, and not much else. I’d rather post more frequently here than post less frequently but spend hours every night cutting and pasting updates into a myriad of different sites. That could mean I don’t care enough. Maybe. Maybe I’m just tired.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Chris Moran