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Dubai SoundCity: Use social networks to build your own mailing list, artists advised

By | Published on Thursday 5 November 2009

Artists should use social network sites to drive traffic to their own websites, rather than using the likes of MySpace and Facebook as their primary fan engagement tool. That’s the advice of Lou Plaia, Founder of ReverbNation, whose company provides tools to help artists and their managers better connect, directly, with their fanbase.

“I come back to the good old fashioned mailing list, albeit one made up of email addresses” Plaia observed, speaking on day one of the Dubai SoundCity convention. “It’s all very well being able to message your fans through MySpace or Facebook, but nothing connects like a communication directly to a fan’s email. Think about it, when you sign up with one of those social networking sites, the first thing they ask for is your email address. Even they know the value of that”.

As CMU Business Editor Chris Cooke, also speaking as part of the SoundCity social networking panel, pointed out, many artists initially shifted their fanbase away from their official website to their MySpace profile because it actually gave them more control.

Cooke: “Many artists’ websites were and are controlled by their record companies. Which is why artists so quickly embraced MySpace, despite all its limitations, because it gave them an easy way to connect with fans directly – no longer was a label’s web team or agency required. Even more so with Twitter – simply because it is so easy to use – while some labels do control their artists’ MySpaces, most acts seem to directly manage their Twitter feeds”.

But Cooke agreed with Plaia that bands should try and use their social networking activity to drive traffic to a website they themselves control. As the ReverbNation man added: “It seems crazy to me that artists would let MySpace have exclusive access to their fans’ email addresses”.

Controlling your own mailing list is, of course, easier now than ever before, because a number of companies – ReverbNation among them – provide tools that enable artists and managers to aggregate email addresses and communicate with fans, often at no cost. This means bands no longer need to rely on a label or social networking platform to provide the technology needed for online fan management. And hurrah for that.



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