MySpace Friends or Facebook Fans for Bands and Artists
Posted April 13, 2009 by Gabriel Hurley
MySpace fans are meaningless, while Facebook fans represent real people ready to support you. Yet industry executives are still looking at MySpace to see who's popular.
Facebook and its core user base has always been about real identity. Fake profiles on Facebook are a minority and are only tolerated for the sake of either celebrity or humor. Bots are nearly non-existent.
MySpace, on the other hand, cultivated a culture of representing yourself however you want, and spawned droves of friend-bots that auto-add people meaninglessly all day and night.
And yet MySpace became the place for bands. So much so that record execs look at MySpace friend counts before they'll even talk to you. So all the bands got out their friend-bots and the problem just got worse.
It's a totally different story in Facebook-land, though. On Facebook, people only become fans of things they actually like. And they're all real people. You may have 10,000 friends on Myspace, and only 50 fans on Facebook, but those 50 people are a hell of a lot more likely to listen to your music, come to your show, or buy your CD.
So if any industry executives are listening out there: Stop watching the numbers on MySpace and start looking at Facebook if you want to know about real fans. Bots don't buy CDs.
amen.
thanks for coming out to the show last night!
YES! I hope the entire record industry reads this. Although they are probably all too busy trying to bail water out of their sinking canoes with teaspoons.
Metaphor can be fun.
I completely agree. My hope is that MySpace fades into oblivion soon. The pages I see on that site are hard to look at, they make the internet cry. These record execs will always be behind the curve, hopefully they'll fade from existence eventually as well.