Facebook, myspace and gig promotion
I keep hearing everyone say, ‘Facebook is a social tool, it’s not really for club promotion – myspace is what that was designed for’. Interesting. Sure, myspace seems to have all the record labels you could want, plenty of artists showcasing their music and great features for artists in general, but is it good for the local artist who wants to let people in his local area know gigs are occurring? Myspace feels very international, whilst Facebook feels local.
I have a myspace page, have done for a few years – and I have used this to publicise every gig I’ve played at, or have been scheduled to play at, showcase my music and act as a profile page. Whilst friends I know have responded to gig requests, it’s never really made any huge difference (that I can see) to those numbers attending the gig that are outside my friend circle.
I created a Facebook account a while back now, and decided to use the ‘events’ feature to publicise my gigs on Facebook. Much to my surprise, I had people I don’t know confirming themselves as coming, photographers asking for passes to take photos for the night, and generally much more of an online ‘buzz’ about the event than I have seen on Myspace for one my events.
Matt wrote this on 28.01.08 –
It's filed in the Blogging, Brighton, Interesting, Internet, Social media, Social networks box
On January 30th, 2008 at 4:01 pm, Dianna responded:
I have a mate who is a ’struggling music artist’ up North who had a myspace.com page and it worked fairly well for him. When I joined Facebook I sent him an invite to join and 3 months later he has had twice the positive response from his local network then all his time on myspace! There are more people showing an interest in gigs and he has even started sellling CD’s too. I prefer Facebook to find out about local gigs and events as the whole site is simply more user-friendly than myspace.
On January 30th, 2008 at 6:35 pm, Barry responded:
Hi Matt,
My band (Left Hand Red) have been using MySpace for about two and a half years, and while it’s been a good way of getting random people to listen to our music, it’s only resulted in a handful ever coming to our gigs.
I wasn’t sure that Facebook was much better until Sunday evening when I got an email from our singer saying that 32 people had flagged themselves as attending our next gig (not that I’m expecting them all to show, of course!). There are now about 30 people on the list, disregarding band members, significant others and friends who always show up.
I think a lot of the difference is due to the ’signal-to-noise’ ratio on both those sites (or relevant info to irrelevant info). MySpace is incredibly noisy and International, and a lot of members have five-figure ‘friends’ lists, so I expect that people ignore most of the messages and bulletins that come their way.
Facebook, on the other hand, seems to encourage a much more closely-knit, hand-picked and, as you say, local network of people and other entities that keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high.
On January 31st, 2008 at 11:30 pm, Paul responded:
For what it’s worth, I also think Facebook looks much nicer. Some MySpace pages look so jumbled, with colours and boxes and flashing things all over the place. MySpace encourages individual expression, but unless you can make web pages look nice, perhaps it subconsciously puts people off. Maybe potential audience members cringe and think “If they can’t create a decent atmosphere on a web page, what’s the gig going to be like?” Facebook brushes most of that aside and is more business-like about it.
On February 7th, 2008 at 1:04 pm, BadgerGravling responded:
I’ve had similar experiences for non-music events.
Myspace broadcasts the event out in a similar way to traditional advertising/marketing.
Facebook allows me to target the most important and relevant people on my friends list to invite, and then let their network build on that.
I’ve found that, for artists and designers for example, using Virb was far more productive than Myspace, for the same reason…