How to Defeat and Kill The Devil MySpace

Myspace is a wasteland of fake profiles, horrible coding, obnoxious ads and total brain death.  Unfortunately, it’s also 100% nescessary for making money off music in 2008.  It’s the largest built-in audience of any social networking site, and if you’re doing hip hop, metal or anything that involves lots of young fans, there’s nowhere else to be.

Online promotion through Facebook is a communist nightmare in comparison to the tools available on Myspace.  Let your fans promote you on Facebook—your efforts are better spent shaping your image and reaching new audience on Myspace.

I would like to be clear: MySpace is a demonic entity that sustains itself off the life-energy of it’s users. It is a Waster of Time and an Eater of Hours.  I do not like it.  (I say that as someone who has gotten a hell of a lot through using myspace to network with like-minded souls.)

The first principle, then: GET IN AND GET OUT. Don’t browse.  Remind yourself—constantly—that you are the boss, in addition to being self-employed.  Your time is too valuable to waste on the Merely Interesting.  Have a set routine and execute it, then go do something else.

The Question of Strategy

I’m not going to restate anything that’s already been Said Right.  In terms of MySpace strategy, design, and presentation, there is nothing I could say to improve on Andrew Dubber’s article, “Five Mistakes You’re Probably Making with Your Myspace Page.” If you haven’t already read it, do so.

The Question of Bots

Actually, let me be clear: there really is no question here.  An automated application that does mass “friendbombing” campaigns for you is exponentially more effective than doing it by hand.

There is no comparison whatsoever, and the only argument in favor of not using the Bots is something along the lines of “I have a deep personal and moral commitment to both Carpal Tunnel Syndrome AND wasting vast amounts of my life.”

Don’t get romantic, here.  There’s a lot of charm in a “handmade” myspace campaign, but you really need to be honest about the scale involved here. MySpace has at least 30 million actual human beings online, any given day.  Only a vanishingly small percentage of those millions have any idea who you are.  Every single day, you can be putting total strangers in touch with your music—or not. 

The Question of Demographics

If you’re making hip hip and your plan doesn’t include reaching teenagers, change your plan. Tonight. 

Teenagers are the driving force behind the entire entertainment industry and no matter what kind of music you make, you have teenage fans who haven’t heard of you yet.  I talk to a lot of people who think I’m weird for marketing to kids under 18.  Then again, I think a lot of people are weird for thinking that a 16 year old fan is somehow less important than a 21 year old fan. 

This is pure economics: the 16 year old fans cannot drink and thus, still have money.

A lot of musicians are too cool for all ages shows—that works out great, if you want to ignore the fact there’s over 12 million kids in the United States between the ages of 14 and 20. Teenagers play a lot of video games and watch a lot of movies, and it’s worth approaching those priesthoods about getting your music included in both.  It’s worked out great for at least one friend of mine who got in on Guitar Hero before it was cool. It’s definitely not easy, but then again, if you don’t have quality product you’re not going to make it anyway. 

Don’t be apologetic about having teenage fans, and don’t ignore them in your marketing and promotion plans.

MySpace Newsfeed: Like Facebook Without the Suckage

Facebook, as an application, never really worked for me.  A number of my old friends use it, though, so despite being less than impressed, I still have a Facebook account. 

I completely fail to understand the hype behind Zuckerberg or the Facebook platform. Fortunately, the News Corporation operates on much simpler principles, such as If It Works, Steal It. As of November 2006, MySpace offers users a news feed called “Friend Updates,” and I took advantage of that to build my personal page.  It worked out great: now I’ve got at least one social networking account that’s truly useful. I can keep in close touch with a little over 150 people around the world that I truly love and care about.

This morning, I’m applying that to business, too: setting the Friend Updates to keep track of the artists and producers we’ve networked with over the past 6 months.  I do, unapologetically, keep tabs on dozens of artists—where they tour, how much they charge for tickets, shirts and CDs, where their promo shows up, who their audience is.  They are, after all, the competition.  I also keep up with the careers of cats I would consider my friends, because one of my many hobbies is thinking up mutually beneficial strategies for my extended tribe. 

Remember, win/win/win situations are the entire focus behind Audible Hype, so this is definitely a topic I will continue to address in the future: brainstorming and recognizing opportunities, balancing charity and operational costs, all this and more. Onwards and upwards:

Handling the “Social” Part

All numbers, hacks, code, images, and angles aside—MySpace is, allegedly, about connecting people. As in, computer-assisted interaction with living breathing human beings.  Your fans, your audience, your customers.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed, and one bad day can ruin your reputation for life.  Here’s some hard-won advice:

1. Never Respond to Negativity

If you find yourself insulted by words on a screen, that is a message from the Universe that you need to stop taking yourself so seriously.  Focus on your breathing, go for a walk. 

Getting into e-arguments is a losing battle from every possible perspective.  It’s a waste of energy and time that gets you too wound up to think straight, and best of all, it stays permanently archived online with your idiot name attached to it. 

2. Stop Repeating Yourself

Since you have an inbox on MySpace, people tend to message you.  Odds are, you only get about 5 basic questions, over and over and over again.  I used to waste a lot of time on this, but then it hit me: I needed preformatted replies to these common questions.

Now I have a .txt file on my desktop full of detailed, honest and friendly answers to about 9 different recurring questions.  It saves me time, and the person on the other end gets a more detailed response than they normally would have.  Win/win.

3. Same Goes for Bulletins

I keep another huge running .txt file for all the bulletins I post.  I’ve had a number of music biz types tell me that bulletins are a dead scene, which was puzzling to me.  After all, we keep detailed metrics on every site and we’ve been seeing the proven traffic power of bulletins for about a year and a half now, from Brainsturbator to Audible Hype. 

My suspicion is that few people have given thought to what makes for a quality, interesting and readable bulletin.  Very few artists do anything but post useless bullshit on myspace. It doesn’t take much to distinguish yourself from the lazy herd on this one. 

This is also an instructive lesson on a larger level: Most of the time, when someone “more experienced” tells you flatly that something doesn’t work, it only means they couldn’t get it to work. Just because someone is famous or successful doesn’t exempt them from being a total f***ing idiot, after all.

4. Make it Easy for People to Help You

Here’s a rough template of what I’m talking about: a webpage full of World-Around Records promo, with the code included. Once we’ve got that more usable (and current) it’s going to get integrated into both our website and the World-Around myspace page.

For example:

<a href="http://www.myspace.com/worldaround"><img src="http://www.worldaroundrecords.com/img/WAR_hexlogo_small.jpg"></a>

Bonus Bulletin Advice

Do you post too many bulletins? Do people complain?  First and most obvious: don’t post multiple bulletins at once, don’t post multiple bulletins at once, don’t post multiple bulletins at once.  No other way to put it: that is obnoxious as fuck. However, here’s a simple trick for staying current without irritating your audience: every time you repost a bulletin, go back and delete the old one. 

This is a small and simple step, but on the audience end, the effect is huge.  It will appear to them like you’re magically staying towards the top of the bulletin feed, but without leaving a huge trail of the same bulletin over and over.  Easy.

Do MySpace Metrics Matter?

When there’s over a dozen companies that will drive up your myspace “play count” using automated bots, how much does that metric actually measure?

When we’re all using software that finds accounts using targeted keywords, and then sends those people a “friend” request—300 every day—what exactly does it matter how many friends anyone has?  It’s not an index of popularity, just hustle—how long have you had your software, and do you run it religiously?  30,000 friends doesn’t mean shit about how many people like you, but it says a lot about how much time you’re willing to put in.

On the other hand, those play counts, man....that might just be for personal satisfaction.  When you have your first four-digit day, be psyched, but don’t expect anyone who doesn’t trust you to believe you.

...And To All You Hippies

A lot of people have written me about how I’m “selling out” by even using Myspace.  It think that’s adorably dumb.  What better way to destroy Rupert Murdoch than making a weapon out of one of his own tools?  Think big, kids. Aim high.