The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I'm thinking about moving the "home" of Flvxxvm Florvm from geocities to myspace.

Because, geocities smells of the 1990's and a lot of people won't even click on a geocities URL since then.

So what exactly can you *do* with a band page on myspace? What advantages does it give you?

I see they only host 4 songs. That's OK, geocities never hosted my songs anyway. I'm not looking for song hosting.

What *is* myspace good for?

Also, are you allowed to cuss on myspace?

I don't know if it's much better, but you can also check out purevolume.com. That's where I have mine. The only disadvantage is that, to really do stuff with your music, you have to pay a yearly fee. A free account only allows four songs at a time.

I don't know much about myspace music unfortunately. I have one, but haven't touched it in years.

Well, anyway, this is what I got so far:

http://myspace.com/flvxxvmflorvm2

MySpace has become an unfortunately necessary part of music promotion, I've found. MySpace.com is, last time I checked, the most trafficked website in the United States (if not, then it consistently ranks in the top five).

It's awful in terms of how much spam you'll receive on your page, and how awful the page layouts are (customized and default), and for how unreliable it is. However, it's where everyone is. So you just have to deal with it.

You can upload four songs (five, if you befriend one particular company, I don't recall which). You can't direct-link to them, but you can set it so that users can also download them (beyond just stream them).

You can easily get in touch with your fans (messages, comments, bulletins). Keep contact with other musicians (to set up shows, for example). It's pretty easy to manage a list of shows, at that.

Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't consider whoring your online presence in other places, additionally. (Brad Sucks has a page set up on basically every service out there, and see where he is now.)

rogerroll wrote:(Brad Sucks has a page set up on basically every service out there, and see where he is now.)

And where exactly is that?

Myspace is good. Get your songs up, take some good photos, write a good bio, and you can begin booking purely by email. Send them a link to your page, and that's as good as a demo.

I would say he's arguably one of the most notable Song Fight participants. Though I guess I shouldn't imply that he got that way because he's on all of those services. My point is that, as long as the TOS don't rape you and it's not particularly burdening for you, there isn't much reason not to utilize those services. Any promotion is good promotion.

So, given that myspace is the more ubiquitous of these types of band webpage services, what is the *best* free service in terms of features and capabilities?

I briefly checked out mp3.com and garageband.com, and both seem to over vastly more space for songs than myspace's measly 4 or 5. One offers 100 MB and the other 200 MB. That's dozens, if not hundreds, of songs.

Granted, I don't actually need a service like this to host my MP3's. I have other.. ahem.. arrangements for that. But there is advantage to having them on the page, in terms of the service be able to track the number of plays, and making it easy for other people to put your songs in playlists, etc.

I remember the "old" mp3.com, before all the lawsuits and stuff, was pretty much the grandaddy of these kinds of things right?

yeah, those halcyon days of mp3.com... that was my first music site.
-bill

There's always the free web hosting route, if you're into the DIY thing.
My site is hosted at doteasy.com for free (I still have to register the domain, of course), and I get 200MB of space, and more transfer than I've ever used in a month. (Came close a couple times though.)

My Myspace page gets heavier traffic than my own site.

FYI, if you want to embed your songs in your own Web site, it's pretty easy to do that. There's a decent free open-source Flash mp3 player out there:

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

You should try Virb.com, it's a social networking site, not a lot of people are on it, but if you only want a site to point people to, it's not bad. It's more customizable than MySpace and a lot less ugly. Plus you've got 100meg of space to host your songs. You can divide your 100 megs into as many songs or albums as you want.

If I only had 1 free "one stop shopping" site, I'd probably use it above all others. Here's my page:

http://virb.com/projectd

I only use their basic layout, but look around the site to see what you can do with customization.

Lunkhead wrote:FYI, if you want to embed your songs in your own Web site, it's pretty easy to do that. There's a decent free open-source Flash mp3 player out there:

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

Nice.

jeff robertson wrote: I briefly checked out mp3.com and garageband.com, and both seem to over vastly more space for songs than myspace's measly 4 or 5.

I quite like garageband.com - though I haven't been there for a while. You get to put up a song for free if you review 30 songs by other prople (in 15 pairs of 2 reviews) Its a lot of work and most of the songs are shithouse - but when you do get a song up - you get lots and lots of feedback. And having people talk about me is what life is all about really.

The only thing that pisses me off is they classify everything into "genres". There seems to be an entire genre dedicated just to bands that sound like Nickelback. They call it "alternative".

Caravan Ray wrote:

jeff robertson wrote: I briefly checked out mp3.com and garageband.com, and both seem to over vastly more space for songs than myspace's measly 4 or 5.

I quite like garageband.com - though I haven't been there for a while. You get to put up a song for free if you review 30 songs by other prople (in 15 pairs of 2 reviews) Its a lot of work and most of the songs are shithouse - but when you do get a song up - you get lots and lots of feedback. And having people talk about me is what life is all about really.

The only thing that pisses me off is they classify everything into "genres". There seems to be an entire genre dedicated just to bands that sound like Nickelback. They call it "alternative".

This prompted me to join Garage Band.com to check it out. Confusing to me. Every click has me wondering all over hell. Not a good site to figure out intoxicated. Way to much stuff to wallow through.

I kind of like the one Project - D posted, as far as a free band page and music hosting is concerned.

rogerroll wrote:MySpace has become an unfortunately necessary part of music promotion, I've found. MySpace.com is, last time I checked, the most trafficked website in the United States (if not, then it consistently ranks in the top five).

It's awful in terms of how much spam you'll receive on your page, and how awful the page layouts are (customized and default), and for how unreliable it is. However, it's where everyone is. So you just have to deal with it.

You can upload four songs (five, if you befriend one particular company, I don't recall which). You can't direct-link to them, but you can set it so that users can also download them (beyond just stream them).

You can easily get in touch with your fans (messages, comments, bulletins). Keep contact with other musicians (to set up shows, for example). It's pretty easy to manage a list of shows, at that.

Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't consider whoring your online presence in other places, additionally. (Brad Sucks has a page set up on basically every service out there, and see where he is now.)

Yeah, all that is what I was going to say. I've had WAY more listens on MySpace than on my personal site in way less time of existence.

It's also good for finding old friends, if you want to. But if you don't, then don't indicate who you really are.

jeff robertson wrote:So, given that myspace is the more ubiquitous of these types of band webpage services, what is the *best* free service in terms of features and capabilities?

I remember the "old" mp3.com, before all the lawsuits and stuff, was pretty much the grandaddy of these kinds of things right?

Yeah, but more people use MySpace.

Lunkhead wrote:FYI, if you want to embed your songs in your own Web site, it's pretty easy to do that. There's a decent free open-source Flash mp3 player out there:

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

That's great! I needed something just like that to get me going again on my website. I finally have it up and running thanks to this post. Thanks Lunk!

My website is http://www.radnoise.com by the way.