IndieHQ / Article Detail

July 6th, 2008

MySpace Offers To Find Your Fans

Although I’m not keeping my label going with new releases anymore, I still sell back catalog and manage a few MySpace pages. I was checking through my emails, filtering out the spam comments and saw this email from Tom regarding a beta program for artists:

” We are happy to announce that artists can now buy ad space on MySpace. We call the program Find Your Fans. Find Your Fans On MySpace is a quicker, easier and smarter way to promote yourself, your band or your brand on MySpace. Find Your Fans is a user-friendly tool for you to use to advertise your band, brand or yourself on MySpace. You can target specific types of MySpace users you want to reach. Simply create your ad, tell us who should see it, how long you want to run it and how much you’re willing to spend. That’s it!

We’ll display your ad all throughout the MySpace site to the users you’ve chosen, putting your message in front of millions of potential customers and driving traffic to your profile until your campaign’s reached its spending limit or the expiration date set by you, whichever comes first.

When are you charged? Only if someone clicks on your ad — not when your ad is displayed.”

For musicians, this cost-per-click is probably a better investment than Google Adwords, as MySpace is such a specific destination for music discovery. It also has the effect of stealing the thunder from all the spammers. I’m actually surprised they didn’t do it sooner, but I imagine that now that they are in bed with the majors on MySpace music there’s some kind revenue kicker back to the labels.
I also see this as a watershed moment for the perceived value of music to social networks- it’s not just a one way street as some would have you believe. If MySpace is developing an entire revenue source by selling the ads on artist pages, it means they are aware the music drives page views, recorded music and artists fan bases have a value, and the audience they bring contributes to their bottom line.

“For fans of …” has always been a crucial pillar of music marketing, and it really makes sense for artists and social networks to put a tollbooth on it, and re-compensate those artists for those smaller ones drafting behind their brand name. My only beef with this is that if there’s a product sold on an artist page on the basis of that artists popularity, unsigned and indie artists should also participate in revenue generated by their pages as incremental revenues are important to every strata of label/ artist, not just those who occupy the Billboard charts.

Written by Bill Wilson