Does your band have a digital strategy?

One thing they never prepare you for in band boot camp is the tedious and incessant task of marketing. For most unsigned bands such as my own, the goal is quite simply to become signed. I’m in the fortunate position where my band don’t want the fame, but this doesn’t mean we don’t want attention and marketing yourselves is the only way to get this, even if its just to get gigs.

The problem is not the how these days, but rather the where. Bands today need to keep up with Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Bandcamp, Band Page, Sound cloud, Songkick, their own domain name and many more. Its no surprise that this portfolio of profiles is often manage by the labels themselves, not the bands. Without the pleasures of a label however, its a bewildering task.

The quandry: is it a bad thing to spent all your time keeping umpteen different profiles active and seemingly happ’ning, thereby diluting your hits on any single one of them, or is it good to spread yourself thinly and maximise the chance that the populace of each site will find you?

Back in 2007, Myspace was the alpha and omega for band profiles. Although personal Myspace pages were a shitasmic clash of lurid, sparkly-gif-ridden graphics and embedded auto-playing mp3 players bellowing inarguably terrible music at you, the Myspace Band pages were a pleasant oasis. For all its faults, Myspace had a convenient monopoly on the whole Band Profile concept. Everyone who was anyone in the music scene had a Myspace account. It was a common language. You didn’t need to worry about all those other profiles; anyone you really needed to contact had a Myspace account and they in turn could safely assume you did too.

Then over the years while other social networks like Facebook came to the fore, conversely Myspace became underfunded and steadily worse by comparison. The lack of “boxes” and “apps” in Myspace became a sticking point and before you knew it people were making the transition. The signs that users were migrating to Facebook from Myspace were clear: notably the surge of Facebook pages saturated with apps. Friends of my own had Facebook pages so massively, tastelessly pimped out with apps, they simply didn’t load! The act of pimping was no different to what users did on Myspace - they had simply upgraded and move on, like tape to CD.

Facebook Pages are now arguably the profile to have. Indeed many businesses are focussing all their attention on a well-maintained Facebook Page rather than keeping up appearances on any other sites. The one remaining useful feature of Myspace band pages is the mp3 player, but even that is becoming obsolete thanks to Facebook’s Band Pages app and Soundcloud etc.

Perhaps the secret is to have a basic profile on all of these sites, but ensure they clearly link back to just one? This is the approach my band are thinking of taking. Many profiles, but all pointing to one source. The plan is to update our Myspace with a banner which links to our main website, then pretty much clear out the rest of the page. Our main .co.uk website will have an mp3 player from Soundcloud and a Facebook Like Box and that’s pretty much it. Every other site we’re part of can be embedded into our main website just as the Facebook Like Box can.

It seems the secret to a successful social network isn’t about making an all-singing, all-dancing portal (although that helps), but providing modularity and the ability to export segments of the experience to other sites/locations, including your rivals, via plugins like the “Like box”. The secret to good band marketing is still out there, but it may just be to target the social network du jour, but keep a presence on the rest. We’ll have to see how it pans out.