Hot on the heels of our brief look at the massive numbers of musicians using social networking sites as part of our ‘We Are Your Friends’ article we take a closer look at the phenomena.

There’s no doubt about it, the rise of social networking has brought about amazing new opportunities for musicians.  From the mainstream sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and more recently Twitter to the more music focused Reverb Nation and Last FM the choices are huge and getting bigger all the time.  Each site, however, has its own strengths and weaknesses for the unsigned band or singer / songwriter.  The majority of bands, whether signed or unsigned, have a MySpace page.  This is partly down to it being around for longer than most but mainly due to the fact that with a little knowledge of CSS MySpace pages are fully customisable.  Another reason for the mass uptake has to be the stories in the press surrounding the signing of artists like Lily Allen, Kate Nash, The Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom. 

The problem that has come from the ‘MySpace effect’ is that these kind of stories don’t happen too often.  The press will only see something as newsworthy for a short time.  The attention soon moved from MySpace friend lists to the Brit School and now it’s going to go somewhere else.  That’s the nature of the business.  ‘News’; the clue is in the word.

So, what is the best way of using these sites?  The truth is that each site lends itself to different things.  MySpace is currently the main player in terms of number of musicians but Bebo also has the same type of page customisation.  Bebo also has a large number of ready made fans if you can get your music to them.  Facebook is a relatively new player in terms of music and the fact that their pages aren’t as easily customisable and don’t have a facebook.co.uk/yourname URL, but instead have a long list of numbers doesn’t lend itself to band advertising at the moment.  It does have a very large number of users though and they are your potential audience. 

Twitter is definitely the up and coming site out there.  Our own experience of twitter has been amazing.  We have, however, found that the majority of users seem to be from the US.  This will also probably change over the months and years but whether it lends itself to band promotion is yet to be seen.  There’s no doubt that at some point in the near future the media will be claiming that some underground band or other has been signed down to their tweets. 

Whether that will be true or not however is debatable.  - Time to shatter a few myths - The Arctic Monkeys didn’t use MySpace to promote themselves, their fans did.  Lily Allen didn’t have a MySpace page until her record label Regal (EMI subsidiary) set one up for her and Sandi Thom’s story about performing to 100,000+ a night from her basement seems to have happened after the press ran the story, not before.  It certainly wasn’t promoted through social networking.  The old media adage ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story’ seems to be well at work.  The only thing that does seem true is that Lily Allen had Kate Nash in her top friends list.

To be honest, if you’ve been sending out hundreds of requests to the already famous hoping they’ll notice you and give you the leg up you’re sure you deserve, it’s probably been a waste of time.  The press have moved on.  Maybe they’ll be back but not until someone gives them a new angle to look at the story from.

So where does this leave bands?  Well, there’s no doubt that any musician can benefit from being part of a few social networks.  As we’ve already said, they have different strengths so it’s probably best to be part of as many as you can manage.  They also have different users so it can’t harm your cause if you reach out to a few different audiences.

Something we have noticed about some unsigned band’s attitude to social networking sites is that they don’t seem to think they give them as professional a face as a website.  In our opinion, this is not the case.  If you have the technical ability in or around the band to make a decent website then great, go for it.  Things to remember about websites though is they need maintenance, often cost money to create and host and need to be updated regularly.  We have seen lots of great band websites in our searches.  Most though either tend to be hugely out of date due to the updating restrictions or don’t exist at all.  We understand the limitations of social networking sites but they are far outweighed by the positives. 

There are also plenty of 3rd party sites that can help your page look more unique without you needing to know a thing about CSS.  Sites such as http://www.pimp-my-profile.com/ and http://my-spacelayouts.co.uk/ give you the ability to use ready made templates or tweak CSS variables such as font and background colour and others such as http://photobucket.com/ will host any graphics you wish to use.

The truth with social networking is that like all other things, you have to keep up the momentum.  It’s no good just getting your page, or making a glossy CSS background for it.  You need to look at it as one piece of a jigsaw.  Your music is the most important piece.  You can package it any way you like, bad music will be lost in the sea of better music unless you have a few million pounds to throw at promoting it. 

Whether you’re technically minded or not your band can make great use of the various social networking sites out there.  Will they get you signed?  Probably not, but they’ll almost certainly get your music out there to people that wouldn’t have heard it any other way, and who knows, you might even make a friend or two.  Let’s face it, signed or unsigned, we can all do with a few more of those. 

So there it is.  Anti social networking?  No.  No we’re not.