By Glenn Lovell

Tips, Secrets & Strategies for Launching

Your Music Career on Myspace

musicmarketingtips.co.uk
Tips, Secrets & Strategies for Launching Your Music Career on Myspace

MySpace Crowd Control

Making the World Your Stage

Tips, Secrets & Strategies for Launching

Your Music Career Using MySpace

By Glenn Lovell

www.musicmarketingtips.co.uk
Tips, Secrets & Strategies for Launching Your Music Career on Myspace

Table Of Contents
Intro 5
Reasons This Book is Important 8
Design and Layout 9
Finding Fans 10
Your Top Friends 12
Joining Groups 13
Schools and Old Classmates 13
Marketing 16
Posting Bulletins 17
Adding Upcoming Shows 17
Add Song Requests 18
Upload Videos 19
Posting to Classifieds 19
Chatrooms 20
Building Up Your Rep 22
Posting to Your Blog 22
Your Opinion in the Forums 23
MySpace Music Charts 24
Networking 24
Joining Groups 25
The Music Directory 36
Shortcomings of Myspace and How to Handle Them 27
Biggest Mistakes Musicians Make on Myspace 28
Band Sessions 32
Bury Tomorrow 32
Stephanie Anderson 42
David Verity 47
Burn the Fleet 52

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Tips, Secrets & Strategies for Launching Your Music Career on Myspace

Table Of Contents
Music Marketing Tips Articles Collection 56
Know Your Fans on Myspace, Don’t “no” Your Fans 56
Getting the Most from Your Myspace Music Page 57
Get More Myspace Plays - What Musicians Should Be Concerned
About On Myspace 58
How Can I Use Myspace Music Marketing and More Plays for
Offline Music Promotion Purposes 59
Music Promotion Using Viral Marketing And Old Fashioned Word Of
Mouth. More Plays And Views 61
Tips For Writing Effective Music Blogs On MySpace 62
Tips and Strategies on MySpace Music Marketing, Promotion and
Online Branding For Artists 64
Selling Your Music on MySpace for Independent Music Artists:
Music Marketing and Promotion Tips 65
MySpace Music Marketing Tips: How to Attract Record Labels 66
How To Market Your Music Thru MySpace And Get Noticed! 68
How MySpace Music Indie Artists Succeed 69
Top 3 Ways MySpace Bands and Artists Use Email Marketing
Programs 70
Music Networks - How Bands and Musicians Use Music Networks
for Band Promotion 72
28 Essential Music Sites To Promote Your Music 74
10 Essential Twitter Habits for Your Band 78
5 Secrets To Hit The Billboard Charts 80

Additional Resources 81

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Tips, Secrets & Strategies for Launching Your Music Career on Myspace

Intro
Reality television shows are falsely lulling
music career hopefuls into thinking that the
road to a music career is being discovered by
an industry insider and winning a multi-million
pound contract in just one exciting evening.

Don’t be fooled by shows like X Factor &

American Idol. The music industry has changed
dramatically in the last few years. The Phil
Spectors of the world no longer control the
fate of musicians. If you put all your hopes and
dreams of ‘making it’ by being one of twelve
contestants in a reality television show, your
music may never soothe, caress or blow out
the eardrums of potential fans.

The music world has dramatically changed, but NOT because of reality television.

It seems that times have reverted back to the “good ol’ days” where musicians had to play their
hearts out in dark, dank and damp little pubs/clubs in the middle of nowhere to build up a buzz
about their music. Every night hoping and praying that some A&R guy from some big record label
catches their performance. Well, in a way at least.

The music world has changed. The record companies don’t control what people hear anymore.
The power is now in the hands of the band. Thanks to sites like MySpace, musicians are now able
to sustain living wages, build up a fan base and launch stellar careers. Just look at the likes of Arctic
Monkeys, Enter Shikari & Lily Allen for proof of this…

International fame doesn’t have to come from a 300 day tour across the most remote parts of the
world. It can literally happen from a desktop and a Myspace page. MySpace has now realistically
become that small club that musicians used to have to pack up a van, get a road map, and travel
with their best buds who served as roadies to venture to. Now, there is no travel expense. Fans from
anywhere in the world can see a band’s best performance right from their desktop.

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Tips, Secrets & Strategies for Launching Your Music Career on Myspace

In an Electronic Music interview American Indie artist Ingrid Michaelson shared her success in her
music career and wholly attributed it to her use of MySpace. Her music has aired several times
on the TV drama Grey’s Anatomy, with her song “Keep Breathing” featured in the final emotional
moments of the hit series’ season finale. Her compositions also appeared on Grey’s Anatomy, vol.
3, Original Soundtrack (Hollywood Records, 2007), an Old Navy commercial, and other film and
TV projects.

She explained how she went from a few friend requests a week to overnight success...

“I came across the artist profile of a [now] friend of mine named William Fitzsimmons. He’s had a pretty
good MySpace following. From the beginning, he’s held steady. He put me in his ‘Top 8’ [friends], and
he wrote a whole thing about me, like ‘Check this girl out - she’s great.’ And a music supervisor found
me through him. That’s how I got Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill. Now it’s snowballing. So I find that
aligning yourself with great artists helps, because that [music supervisor] would never have found me if I
wasn’t on William’s MySpace page.”

It’s hard enough for bands to pay living expenses without worrying about the cost of shelling out
thousands of pounds for promotion. Free promotion is the greatest type of promotion a musician
can ever ask for. Even established bands try to emulate the power of word-of-mouth and free
promotion.

MySpace is THE tool for free promotion that gives musicians the opportunity to own their own
personal web URL, upload songs for fans to sample, advertise tour dates, and demonstrate with
videos how they can bring the house down.

MySpace has been referred to as a “virtual street team.” It’s the ultimate in ‘viral’ marketing that
traditional advertising agencies have been trying to recreate since the advent of advertising
agencies. Bands communicate directly to their fans and then those enthused fans promote and
market the band on the musician’s behalf to their friends and like a virus it spreads. Hence the term,
‘viral marketing’.

There are a plethora of reasons bands take off on MySpace. Fans get behind them because they
want to be able to say “I knew them when…,” they love the music, they are motivated by the band’s
initiative, they are drunk with their own power to influence the band’s career, and a number of other
unyielding phenomena. Whatever the reason, MySpace is a marketing and networking strategy no
band creating music in the 21st century can overlook.

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Tips, Secrets & Strategies for Launching Your Music Career on Myspace

Just as a traditional website can serve as a brochure for a Fortune 500 company or a small business,
MySpace serves as an electronic press kit for musicians. Any pertinent information that members of
the media would need are available on the page - music, bio, tour dates, video and photos.

I have been in the ‘live music’ and ‘band promotion’ industry for 16 years in one form or another. I’ve
scouted for Columbia Records (Ger) and I’ve promoted shows throughout the south of England
from Oxford, Bristol to Southampton and Brighton.

I now currently own Southampton’s (UK) most historic live

music venue, The Joiners. (www.joinerslive.co.uk) I am also
the founder/owner of Southampton’s main alternative indie/
rock nightclub (Unit Club). As you can imagine, I’ve seen a
lot of bands come through our doors over the years. This
has given me first-hand experience of the right and wrong
ways for bands to approach us for gigs. In recent times
we’ve come to pretty much utilize MySpace as THE tool of
choice when researching & checking out bands to book. A
bands profile can simply make or break our decision when
considering booking them.

With that in mind, consider this if you will… if we as a live

music venue and promoters decide upon a bands credibility
based upon their MySpace profile, then who else is doing
the same?

Industry professionals, labels and agents are among the

top people you should be concerning yourself with. So if
you’re not taking advantage of and maximizing your MySpace marketing to its fullest potential, then
to be quite frank you’re a fool. Because right now you could be missing out on what’s rightfully
yours as a band/artist.

Because of my unique perspective, positioning and history within the music industry I wanted to
share my experience and knowledge with you by providing a useful guide, to not only help with
your MySpace promotion for getting gigs but also on a much bigger level and more importantly,
provide you the artist/band with information on what steps you can take to greatly increase your
odds of being discovered.

And I’ll be doing this by showing you how to position yourself the ‘correct’ way to get yourself
FOUND and discovered as opposed to you doing the chasing.

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Tips, Secrets & Strategies for Launching Your Music Career on Myspace

Reasons This Book Is Important

As I’ve just mentioned the music
industry is impaled with a crisis. The
industry doesn’t know how to handle
a world in which the listeners control
the music they want to hear.

It used to be that music lovers were

forced to listen to the same rotation of
songs fed to them by radio stations,
and of course, the record companies
controlled what the radios listeners
heard.

This worked for them for a very long time. Even songs that listeners didn’t like became favorites
after hearing them over and over again. After hearing the songs a few thousand times, they would
become etched into the listener’s brain

This simply doesn’t work that way anymore. Of course Radio isn’t totally dead, far from it in fact
but it’s clearly not quite as significant as it was ten or twenty years ago. Music lovers can turn off
the radio in their cars and plug in their iPods. They can create their own playlists and radio station
selections. Music lovers are finding music from other sources now, such as websites like MySpace,
podcasts and recommendations from their friends.

And that is why MySpace is so damn important. It gives bands the opportunity to get their music heard
by the people that really count. THE FANS.

And because of this, it frustrates me that there are a lot bands out there not using MySpace to its
fullest potential. There have been some great bands come through the doors at the Joiners over the
years that have deserved to be noticed, but they simply didn’t know the right way of going about
things to get themselves heard locally, online, and potentially to even a global marketplace.

My intentions with this book is simple! To provide a guide for you to follow to help you finally realize
the dream that is right at your fingertips. A lot of bands get frustrated and give up too early. So if I
can help speed up the process and help you get noticed quicker, then this book will have achieved
its aim of helping to launch the music career that you have dreamt of, and hopefully it will help your
band keep going and growing and prosper. So lets get started...

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