MySpace Music - A Place For Musicians

Being active both on and off MySpace will grow your fanbase and give people more opportunity to connect with you and hear your music. Building your community on MySpace allows your friends and fans to not only connect with you and discover your music, but also provides the perfect platform for them to showcase it themselves and recommend you to others, as well as allowing you direct access to inform them when you post a new song, your gig schedule or any other info about what you're up to.

Start by making friends with users who are near your current location (ie. in your home town) and then expand to users who you think might either like your music, or who live in towns/cities you will be playing in next.

Go to 'Find Friends' in the 'Friends' tab in your nav:

Search for friends by demographic, geographic location, or tastes in music:

• Find friends through current friends.
• Pay specific attention to users who have listed certain favourite artists and bands on their profile that your music is similar to.

Go to 'Find Friends' in the 'Friends' tab in your nav:

Use the MySpace groups section to target users interested in a certain genre or music type, and users who are friends with other artists/bands that have similar music to your own.

Think about setting up a MySpace page to manage your street teams & fan clubs. You can contact your entire street team or fan community with one bulletin:

• Offer them exclusive access to you at gigs.
• Give them details of competitions before anyone else.
• Easily arrange street team meetings with the events function.

The possibilities are endless, but they begin with creating an online home for all of your band activity on MySpace.

We are always trying to strike a balance between the community of users who use MySpace to talk to their friends and the bands that use MySpace for promotion, so here's our advice:

Don't mass add! Invite users who you think would listen to your music.

Personalise your messages, otherwise your message will look like SPAM! Spam doesn't get read - if 20 people mark your message as spam, we'll block your account.

Beware of HTML. HTML in the message looks like SPAM.

MySpace limits the amount of messages, comments and friend requests you can send in a day. You will not be deleted or penalised for sending too much, you'll just be informed when you hit the upper limit and you won't be able to send anymore until the counts are reset within 24 hours. We know that this is not ideal for bands trying to get the word out, but it's not ideal for users of MySpace to be bombarded with unlimited messages from every band on the site, not to mention random spammers who would try to exploit that.