Who Is Listening?

Friday November 6, 2009

Yesterday, a reader commented on my blog from earlier this week about MySpace (you can read that one here) and raised a very good point - when we're talking about MySpace or any music promotion tool, the most important thing to consider isn't what is in fashion right now and what isn't but rather what YOUR fans are doing.

This is such an excellent point because sometimes one obvious fact gets lost in the shuffle of discussions of online platforms, falling sales and so on - the starting point for every decision you make about your music should be knowing your audience. What are their ages? Where do they live? How do they buy their music? What sites/papers/magazines/blogs do they read? What social networking sites do they use - if they use them at all? When you know who is listening to your music, you know how to reach them.

For instance, let's consider promoting your music on social networking sites for a moment. You can read reams of blog posts/articles about how great social networking is for music promotion, how it is the wave of the future, blah blah blah. When you spend all day online and enjoy using social networks, it can be hard to imagine that is could be any other way - especially since so much information bigging up the effectiveness of social networking sites is being swapped on, well, social networking sites.

However, what happens if your fans just aren't on these sites? What if your fans couldn't care less about friending you on MySpace or Facebook, following you on Twitter, or any other site? Believe me, it happens. You could be investing lots of time running an admirable social networking campaign that might work wonders for other musicians, but your fans might not have any idea. You need to know where your fans are so they find out about all of those unreleased tracks, secret shows and everything else you're offering.

Knowing fans can also help you sell more music, book shows in the right places, target the right press, create the right merch and much, much more.

Next week, we're going to be looking at different ways to get to know your fans and how you can use that knowledge to further your music career. In the meantime, do you have some suggestions of your own for identifying your fan base? Share your stories!

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