MySpace: Getting Your Music and Banners Onto Fans’ Pages
by Wil Morgan

Now, thanks to the wonder of MySpace and a few ingenious services, dedicated fans can eschew the cold street corner for the comfort of their computer chair as they work their online street team skills. Through their various social networking pages, fans call sell their favorite band’s music with all the revenues going back to the band. On a smaller promotional scale, fans can also post a band’s banner on their pages with very little effort. It is simply a matter of giving them the tools.

Online service Musicane (www.musicane.com) provides you with a digital storefront that can be placed on any of your social network pages, including MySpace, Friendster, and TagWorld, opening your purchasable music to millions of users. This storefront, as seen above, can sell videos and ringtones in addition to audio tracks. The embed function, at the bottom of the window, powers the service's functionality, enabling users to distribute the storefront to the internet's most popular community sites with simple one-click access. Fans can then effectively drag and drop your store onto their own pages. Every time someone purchases your song through a fan’s store, the money will go directly into your Musicane account. Once again, the fan is left with nothing but the satisfaction of having aided their favorite act. Musicane charges a $19.99/month subscription fee and a 20% transaction fee per sale. Speakerheart (www.speakerheart.com) offers a similar service based around their shelves function. Using Shelf Builder, you and your fans can create a storefront with your albums, tracks, and ringtones to paste onto your MySpace, Blogger, and Xanga pages. Again, all the sales made through fans’ storefronts go directly to you. Audio track sales through Speakerheart pay out at 75 cents each. Sales through Musicane and Speakerheart are reported to SoundScan automatically for charting purposes. Other like-minded resources include Libertunes.com and BlastMyMusic.com.

For a more traditional approach to generating support through fans, you can offer up the code to your band’s website banners that fans can then paste onto their sites. Your banner must first be hosted somewhere (your band’s website, Flickr.com, etc.) and then can be put onto your MySpace page, in the Bio section for instance. From there, click on “Edit Profile,” then “Band Profile,” and finally “Edit” below your bio to find the actual HTML code for the banner image (it will begin with <img src=). An easier method that requires no knowledge of code is to use a program such as mybannermaker.com. Here, you can select varying fonts, backgrounds, and colors for your banner, and at the bottom simply check the box to allow fans to see and copy the banner’s code. Be aware, however, that banners made through these services will lack characteristics such as animation. The race to create easy-to-use programming that is compatible with MySpace and other social networking sites becomes more concentrated every day, so keep your ear to the ground for new platforms that allow you to make the most of your free, personal online space.