wax&wires

What MySpace Local Means For Musicians

A lot has been made the past few days about MySpace Local, the NewsCorp response to sites like Yelp. Not to be outdone by CitySearch’s integration into Facebook Connect, MySpace local marries MySpace and CitySearch to offer users info and reviews of local businesses. Starting off, they’ve mostly focused efforts on restaurants and night life, with Coors and Outback as the main sponsors of the new venture.

The main difference between MySpace Local and Yelp is that MySpace Local will prioritize reviews and rankings based on your friends and interests, as gathered from your MySpace profile. “That’s a critical difference,” claims Jeff Berman, the MySpace president of sales & marketing. Reviews mean “a heck of a lot more when you know the reviewer.”

So let’s bring it home. How does this impact the local musician?

1) If you’re in a band that plays regularly at a club, users can review the music at venues for better or worse, so bring your best. Conversations regarding the bands at various venues can be opened up on MySpace Local for the rest of the world to see, creating a great opportunity for artist promotion. If you see that clearly you’re pulling in 200 people that wouldn’t otherwise come out to that club, maybe it’s time to show the club owner the reviews and ask for a raise. If you see that people are saying, “The sound sucks here, it’s so much better at Venue X.” Maybe it’s time to move the gig to Venue X. Make sense? Keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on around your music.

2) If you’re looking to increase your fanbase, but don’t know where or how, you can tap into MySpace Local as a means of finding gigs. There’s no magic “gig finder” or anything, but because you can see reviews on venues and how different music was received at various locations, you can run a search to find venues that you might do well in and snag their contact info right off the MySpace Local page to get booked. That’s a heck of a lot better than randomly picking a club halfway across the country and hoping they have crowds and a decent sound system for you.

While all of that is an unintended side effect of MySpace Local’s intended purpose, it’s a great way to harness a new tool to promote your music. The most successful musicians will be the ones that hustle, and are not just simply keeping up on new trends, but constantly thinking of the ways in which every little thing could help their musical career.

You can check out a demo of MySpace Local here.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 1:18 pm. It is filed under wire tips and tagged with concert, live, myspace, promotion, social media, websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.