It seems it is becoming trendier than ever for bands to assume MySpace as a proxy for the internet and just move all their self-branding, fan-reaching, media-distributing on there. This is something I have ranted against here and here. And now I’m going to rant a little more triggered by this article about a band called Knock Knock Ginger (never heard them) in which one of them says:

“If I hear of a band, MySpace is probably the first place I go. For instance, a girl from Italy recently ordered our album and she was like, ‘I really like Canadian bands, can you recommend me some?’ And I just ended up sending her 10 MySpace links. I mean, I don’t even go to websites anymore. It has almost become the new demo.

“I mean, I don’t even go to websites anymore?”

Is this really something bands (and others) want to be pushing?

As I’ve said before, I think it’s pretty obvious that unless you are trying to avoid notice, you need to have a MySpace presence. With the amount of web traffic going through there, it’s a must. For sure.

But you should also have presence in other spaces as well. And all of those spaces, in my view, should lead users back to YOUR OWN SPACE. The one YOU own. The one no one else can wrest from your control, redesign without your permission, change the rules for, etc etc etc.

So it was with considerable delight that I read this astute piece in The Atlantic Monthly adding fuel to my fire:

Already, the most popular users, like the legendarily pneumatic Tila Tequila—friend to more than 1.5 million MySpacers—are realizing that their future is in guiding people off MySpace to their own, more robust, fully customizable personal pages. Indeed, the third rail of social media may ultimately come down to that most old-media of issues: ownership. MySpace may sell the idea of itself as being without boundaries, but in fact the digital mayhem lives within a tightly controlled environment. MySpace does not let users network meaningfully with people outside its walls, and it does not let them import some functionality that promotes or drives revenue to other corporations; for example, those newly popular “widgets” that contain text or video feeds, or games. MySpace has legitimate security reasons for prohibiting the Flash-based widgets, but the effect is also to eliminate a way for corporate competitors to lure users out of the MySpace environment. And MySpace recently announced it will no longer allow users to post videos that contain copyrighted material—hello, YouTube—much as it was already filtering out some major-label music.

Most important, users like Tila Tequila do not profit directly from the traffic they generate for the site. Indeed, the value of MySpace and the other 2.0 sites is built on their ability to monetize—through ad sales and marketing, among other streams—the traffic generated by their users. The tacit trade-off is free Web hosting, tools, and distribution. This trade-off is not in itself unfair. But, as with IM, the value proposition does not remain constant. The walled-garden attributes of MySpace and Facebook, like those of the subscriber-era AOL, can quickly become liabilities. And as the value of social-media tools becomes inevitably unsexy and commoditized, it may be only a matter of time before the Tila Tequilas of the world, inspiration for millions of page views, decide they might as well go elsewhere.

All of these social media are wonderful tools for artists to display their wares, show off their connections with other bands, and build and maintain relationships with their audience, but every band ought to have a home base that is entirely within their own purview and offers more than fans can get on any other site.

This is a fascinating exchange on a Last.fm forum between a musician and users that nicely displays some delicate tensions at play in promoting one’s self in spaces outside your own domain.

Here’s the scenario: A musician has created an independent label page for himself and uploaded some of his music there. He’s then used Last.fm’s built in recommendation feature to send personal recommendations to users far and wide (a common strategy in some other spaces, but seemingly less common on last.fm). The response is not all positive — users who’ve received this recommendation have gone to the label page and left comments in the shoutbox that diss the tunes. The musician complains to the forums, presumably seeking staff intervention. He writes:

I want to be able to delete posts by little babies that can’t handle a recommendation so when they post non-constructive criticism I can delete the posts. Like when a whiney user like M—– or J—–666 leaves a post that is nothing but negative and counterproductive I can delete it and keep my page positive and open.

A few posts later, he elaborates his case by defining the label page as something that a (mere?) “listener” can “mess with”:

Why is Last.FM allowing a listener to keep messing with a Last.FM Independent Label holder? This may be an eyeopener for the other Last.FM Independent Label artists out there.

But his definition of (what he sees as) his own label’s space as a promotional space that he should be able to “keep positive and open” (open = controlled) gets no traction. A (non-staff) moderator defines a label page’s comments section as a collective space:

No one person “owns” a artist/album/track shoutbox, thus there’s no trash icon. Mods cannot remove shouts from there either.

Then a few users get in there and investigate the situation for themselves. They challenge the musician and construct Last.fm as a space that is about the listeners vs “what the music labels, media and so on tell us we should like”:

It looks to me from that album thread that people who like the recommendation have stated so, as have people who hated it.

If Last Fm moved into censorship and negative comments about bands, songs etc. being deleted that would ruin the whole point of Last FM for me – this site should be about music fans, their tastes, views and interests rather than what the music labels, media and so on tell us we should like.

So it seems the solution to this problem is to tailor the recommendations to people who might enjoy the music, rather than sending it to lots of people who have no interest in that style of music.

Another reader argues that this sort of self-promotion on the site should be expected to generate blow-back:

…you really need to lighten up. If you’re going to send out recommendations for your music to random people then you are going to get a few who say they don’t like it. If you don’t want that then be more selective about who you recommend to.Looking through the various threads/shoutboxes I’ve seen you really don’t come across very well.

If someone just decided to listen to your music and didn’t like it, so posted on the shoutbox that they didn’t think it was any good then maybe you’d have a point, but you did ask these people to listen to it.

I don’t think I’d like it, but your attitude has ensured that I haven’t even tried it.

As of this writing, the final post in the thread is a perfect summation of the tensions at play in here between the site’s architecture, the industry’s promotional and image-control concerns (as well as egos), the empowerment of fans that the internet provides through spaces like Last.fm which users have claimed as spaces in which they can define things for one another:

I don’t give a shit about recommendations; I never look at them.

That said [...] don’t be so sensitive. After reading this thread I was prompted to listen to your tracks. I like them. I even downloaded a few.

No matter what type of musician you are, no matter what genre of music you make, 99.999% of people ain’t gonna care for it.

If you put yourself out there, you gotta be prepared for people who diss you.

Say “NO” to censorship. POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

No matter what you’re selling (or giving away), the flip side of being able to promote one’s self to so many people via the internet is that more people are going to tell the world that they dislike you. It’s important to be savvy in understanding the norms of different online environments and watch what works and what doesn’t before diving in one’s self.

Mark Cuban has a fun post up about “FanBoy Culture.” He’s not talking about the sports fans, he talking about the product fans:

I’m a child of an era when teenagers distrusted anything from government or business and I still harbor some of the same viewpoints from then. So imagine my surprise when in writing about Google, Youtube, Apple and other corporate entities or their products, I got flooded by emails and comments disparaging me for my positions. [...] I got typical teenage feedback “You Suck, Google Rocks”. “Youtube is the new Internet, you are old school Internet”, “BitTorrent is amazing and you are not a geek” and things a lot more personal. Such was my introduction to today’s fanboy.

Whatever happened to Counterculture being a positive attribute ? In today’s fanboy culture, kids are obsessively supporting products. They aren’t “fighting the man”, they “are the man”.
[...]

The marketing implications of all of this are fascinating. [...] All marketers dream of having a fanboy base for their products. What is more textbook wonderful than passionate customers ? But like trying to create a video that takes off and becomes viral via Word of Mouth, fanboys happen in spite of marketers, not because of them. The challenge for marketers everywhere is to determine the depth of any fanboy following, how to support it and what the implications are if you don’t match their expectations. Gaming companies have Fanboy advisory groups, I don’t know of any companies outside the gaming world, and certainly not outside the technology world that do.

He goes on to talk about the necessity for all corporations of knowing their fanboys. Obviously, I couldn’t agree more with that assertion. And I love the line “they aren’t fighting the man, they are the man.” Although, if they are the man, what’s up with the turning on them when they don’t match expectations?

The comments on the post are well worth reading and show people really trying to make sense of the fanboy phenomenon — are they just bullies? big brothers teasing little brothers? Or is this the new substitute for religion in a secular society? Is there really a significant difference between being a jerk about your favorite operating system and being a jerk about your favorite basketball team?

One person points out fangirls (what? there are girls on the internet?).

The whole “fanboy” phenomenon throws another twist into online fandom that I don’t think most cultural observers have really picked up on yet. We’re not talking here about creative user-generated content, we’re not talking about building communities, we’re not talking about nuanced engagement with a pop culture product — all things that scholars and critics have been looking at for a while now. We’re talking about knee-jerk promotional activity. What are the motivations here? What are the implications? And what are the dangers of collapsing the ‘fanboy’ activity of spamming blog comments with “You Suck, Google Rocks” with the kind of fan activity that gets into lengthy intelligent debates about the details of whatever google’s done this time. And what are the dangers for corporations of building advisory groups that don’t make that distinction?

It’s not just about knowing your fans and knowing what they say about you, it’s about understanding the different kinds of fans you’ve got, their different ways of engaging what you do, their different needs, their different spheres and levels of influence, and where to concentrate your own energies in making the most of what these very different people do.

The music social network/mp3 download site Amie Street is getting a lot of positive buzz for its innovative business model. Bands upload mp3s that are initially free to download. The more they’re downloaded, the more expensive they become, eventually hitting 99 cents if they’re smash hits. Users can recommend the tracks they like and if they lead to lots of downloads, those early adapters get credit to buy other downloads. It’s got the social networking element so that if people like another person’s recommendations, they can create friendships and then see the songs that their friends have recommended.

I like the idea as I think it benefits both bands and fans. I’ve said before that one of the great pleasures of music fandom is making recommendations that other people like, and the way this is done to feed back to both artists and fans is really nice. It’s an intruiging way to monetize taste making talent as well as musical talent.

One thing a quick glance at the site will reveal is how important this makes the ability to write about music. Several of the recommendations say things like “this rocks” or “I love this song” or “this is better every time I hear it.” Not very helpful. Others are cryptic: “Like a slightly annoyed robot who slowly discovers hope,” “Nice song, alternating between two Ideas. Very original.” A few actually give a hint of what it might sound like: “Swing-y with a touch of soul…yum,” “Think Beatles/McCartney/John Denver, what a mix but it works.”

I think that like many music sites, this appeals to a particular kind of music fan, a “hunter” — someone who’s willing to go out and listen to a lot of things they don’t like in order to find something they do. This has been my experience of Reverbnation as well. Being told something is “indie” or “alternative” or that it “totally rocks” is a long way from there being a good likelihood I’m going to like it.

I figure I’m more of a pecker — I want that yummy seed mixed by someone (or an algorithm) that knows a lot about the dietary habits of a bird like me already or prepared by someone with highly similar taste. I don’t like listening to lots of stuff I don’t like en route to finding the stuff I do. Either that, or I want thick description, like mp3 blog writers who spend a paragraph or two telling me about the band and the song they want me to hear. It doesn’t mean I end up liking all I hear, but the hit rate’s high enough to keep me paying attention instead of throwing up my arms in despair and hitting shuffle on the collection I’ve already amassed.

Right now, all these social network music sites are being promoted as appealing to “music fans in search of new music” without differentiating amongst the kinds of searching for that music we’re willing to do. I predict that this ever-expanding marketplace is going to break down into niches based on the different search strategies people enjoy.

MarketingProfs.com offers The 12 Tenets of Social Media Marketing which are both funny and wise. Their audience is broad, they’re talking about marketing anything. But what they have to say is very relevant to those marketing specifically to fans, especially this pearl o’ wisdom:

XI. Give thy brand to the consumer

They will take very good care of it, for they will give it back to you in better shape than when they got it. Fear not that thy consumer shall have input in your brand. But heed closely thy clueless ad agency so it does not chargeth thee a hefty fee when in fact the consumer creates thy ads.

They will take very good care of it. Don’t fear their input. Don’t pay others for your fans’ creativity. Right on.