I have told you in previous posts that I maintain a band in my off work time, and that our band uses a myriad of different digital music sites as platforms to reach audiences, again just a few we use -- MySpace, Facebook, ReverbNation, Last.fm, Imeem. I know the audiences for independent and major label music are on these sites, so having a presence on them is crucial.However, as much value as we get out of these sites because we are able to reach large audiences -- it’s important to remember this -- we would rather have my own hosted site for our band content. I would use the large social sites as points for discovering our band, and then drive the fans back to our own site.And yet I still see a lot of independent bands skipping out on the creation of their own branded experience. Well that can expose bands to the many potential web design changes and service outages of these well trafficked social media platforms.I look at what has happened over the past few days with our band page at Facebook as further evidence why we can’t rely on a large social media site as the primary space to connect with our fans. Design changes come often, and without our band’s input. And occasional service outages may crop up.For instance, we rely on Facebook to host our band content, yet a outage over the weekend made several of our band’s photo albums unavailable. I knew an outage like this could happen at any time -- as I said previously I would be glad to pay for a Facebook back up system!Very recently Facebook redesigned the look and feel of “the fan pages” for brand marketers -- musicians / bands, small businesses, media brands. (read more). I liked the old design of the fan page for our band on Facebook, because it gave us one single web place to point people towards -- one spot where they could quickly read a brief band bio and listen to a few songs via a music player.As you see below in the picture the recent redesign, moved the music player for our band way to the bottom of the page. And the redesign also took our band bio to the left hand side of the page, so it’s not as prominent as it used to be.
Chuck,I can see you are worried about all the equity you have built on facebook – and rightly so! I wonder when – if at all – they will introduce the freemium model.Also, while every band would probably love to have its own website, I’m wondering whether Eos actually provides different levels of features and services for what I see as the long tail of the music industry. Shruti
Actually Shruti, after a few days, I wound up seeing some positive features of the Facebook redesign for fan pages, and I will follow up with a blog post about that. There are some lessons about content and programming in the Facebook fan page redesign. Eos and the long tail of music? Well I plan to be building an Eos site for my band soon – so I guess there’s one band
However, Eos is not a free platform, and I think that will be a deciding factor for some musicians who are looking for less robust web platforms with lower price tags. At some point though long tail bands may realize being dependent on MySpace and Facebook is not a great place to be, and will start to migrate to software as a service platforms like Cisco Eos.
I beleive social media sites didn’t started as business advertisement platform, they simply created a natural social network to connect people. So I would not much rely on them for business purposes.
I still prefer Myspace and the Myspace Layout Generator“