As a musician, you can really hit up on a great fan base on MySpace and attract new fans for your music. While MySpace certainly has a lot to offer by way of exposure, it also presents one of the greatest word of mouth advertising opportunities available. You can connect with other bands, fans and get a great deal of promotion. Most of the profile owners on MySpace range in age from late teens to early forties. These are prime demographics because they are the groups that are spending the money! You most certainly want to get in touch with these folks!

How it Works

MySpace is really user friendly and it is super easy to set up a killer profile in a very short time. All you have to do is go to MySpace.com. Click on the Music link that is in the navigation located at the top of the page. From there, click on the Artist Signup link that is in the top right of the page and sign up for your own profile. It is very important that you sign up through the Artist Signup link and not a regular sign up link. The Artist Profile has some great music features like tour date calendars and song uploads. You don’t get that with the regular MySpace profile.

Once you’re in, you can customize your page anyway you want. If you know HTML, you can do it yourself. If not, MySpace has some pretty cool layouts or you can find a great layout on the web. All you have to do is paste the code into one of the fields of your profile and you are good to go. You will need to write some information on your profile so that your fans will be able to learn something about you, and you may even want to add some pictures. You do want to check your profile after you add a background to make sure that the text is easily read. A hot background is no good if you can’t read the profile!

Making Friends

Friends are a hot commodity on MySpace, so you will need to make some and add them to your profile. Send invites to family and friends to get you started, then strike out on a friend mining expedition. Check out profiles of other bands that are in your genre. See who on their friends list and request an add from some of them. This is a great way to begin building your friends list.

Promote Yourself

You can do a great deal of promotion on MySpace through the various tools that they have. Each time someone adds you as a friend, place a comment on their page, thanking them. Make sure that your profile photo really rocks and grabs attention so that when visitors to those pages see your comment, they also see a great profile photo that makes them want to check out your profile.

You can also send bulletins to alert everyone on your friends list about upcoming gigs, new releases, CD sales info and other announcements. You can also use the blog feature through your MySpace profile and market yourself through your blogging - but that’s another article.

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