MySpace for Flux Oersted

A long time ago, during the Black Monolith phase of my music doings, I had a myspace page and for some reason, decided it was too much hassle at the time, and deleted it. There are still some of those Black Monolith songs being hosted on other sites like garageband.com and iLike. Most of those songs came over from cassette tapes in the great magnetic flux of 1994. Back then, I had a wooden box full of tapes that I kept all the cassette masters of me repertoires in. I had contingency plans if the house caught on fire, to rescue that box. Now my music is digital and dispersed all over the place. I do however keep DVD-R backups in a safety deposit box at my bank.

But I digress. MySpace pages seem to be a requirement for bands these days. Of course, I'm not a band, but rather a project, still, it seemed like making another go at it would be worth while. Whereas before it seemed like the only people on MySpace were teenagers and sexual predators, nowadays it is more like business on the net.

My new page is at www.myspace.com/oersted. It seems like most of the traffic is from other bands. I remember Dave Thomas from Pere Ubu singing "everybody's in a band" and sometimes it seems like everybody has some kind of band going on.

But this brings me to one of the key ingredients of the web music business: "How to be found." There are millions of listeners, and millions of bands, maybe more music than potential viewers. So how do you connect to them without any sort of traditional ad campaign or promotion?

One way that tunecore.com suggests for doing this in iTunes is to create iMix playlists that contain a few of your songs and a bunch of really popular ones. Then, when somebody finds the play list containing their favorite artist, your music is riding piggy back with it and is potentially heard and tried out. That sounds nutty if you're used to the old days when people listened to the radio, but fewer and fewer people leave home without an ipod or some such device these days for playing "their" tunes. So musicians are left to try and insert themselves into the music search loop somehow.

This brings me back to MySpace. I don't know how anybody actually finds your band page unless they are a musician who systematically goes through all the other band pages doing friend requests. Once "friended" the musician places a thank you message in the target band's page and that serves as an advertisement and a link back to their own band page. Now if all the visitors to your music are other musicians then you'd better have some really good music if you hope to sell them anything of your own. All the other electronic musicians can pretty much duplicate most of what they are going to hear as they make their rounds through all the other band pages, posting advertisement comments.

Every bit counts though. The more search efforts you can seed, the better. There's always a chance that somebody will like what they hear enough to pay for it. Somebody has to pay for it the first time before it can wind up on a bittorrent search.

Another question arises. Would you rather be heard or would you rather hold out and be purchased? On soundclick.com/fluxoersted I have my entire current catalog of music available for sale, by the single, in albums, but also for free to be streamed. I endorse the play before you pay philosophy. Most big name artists don't feel this way. They have lo-fi 30 second sound bytes available. Some even put partial songs on their MySpace page. To me, the "try some, buy some" plan is more equitable when you're like me, unknown, and with nothing to lose. But there again, all the participants on soundclick.com are other bands. Of course, that may just be my perception. There may be more listeners than it seems like and I'm just not getting them.