Some years ago, many musicians were very intrigued by the idea of doing business on their own. Booking shows, doing PR work, writing a song, do some HTML homepage programming, CD layout, write another song… The way of spending your time seemed quite stable and reasonable (whatever that may be).
Then came mySpace. And everyone had to get in. New activity: Figuring out how to have your own layout. Individual artist homepages got dumped. MySpace was the place to be. Then came Facebook. MySpace was declining, everybody went on to create their artist pages on Facebook, allowing for more connections but a less individual look. But hey, content matters, right? Then came Twitter. No look at all, no content. Just… another place to waste your time, figuring out what to say in 140 characters. But you had to have it. Totally connected. Boiling point. And now: Google Buzz! Artists collapsing all over the place.
They start complaining (quite rightfully) that they cannot handle all these connections without spending so much time on them that they practically don’t creeate music anymore. Mission failed.
Here’s my advice: Get off mySpace, it’s no use but a dead end. Have a blog, on Typepad, WordPress, Blogger or whichever you prefer. Just select a theme you like and add your images. Set up a bit.ly account that hooks into your Twitter account and automatically shortens the links you post. Go to a service like twitterfeed.com which hooks into your blog’s RSS feed and automatically posts to Facebook, Twitter and whatever they support. If you’re using Gmail, Google Buzz is now built in and can automatically re-post your Twitter tweets (but not vice versa). There. All done. Now go make some music. The web takes care of itself.