Facebook and Myspace; Where The People are and Where The Features are

I’ve noticed that a lot of bands either have a Myspace profile or a Facebook profile. Personally, I believe that a band should have both. The reason I say that is basically because there are advantages to each one that the other doesn’t have. Facebook is where the people are but Myspace is where the features are.
Myspace has done a recent redesign of their site. They have also begun to refer to themselves as a “Social Entertainment” website, to basically focus more on the entertainment industry. I think it’s just an attempt to recapture some of their lost user base. Time will tell if their changes will yield adequate results in that respect.


Among the problems facing Myspace, in my humble opinion, are relentless spamming by its users, long loading time for their pages and a user interface that is harder to navigate than their competitors’. The main competitor being Facebook of course. However, for a band, Myspace has a lot of great features that Facebook just can’t compete with. At least not at this time.

Myspace has its own music player you can use for your band. You can upload up to ten songs and put them in any order you want, in the player. You could also use embed code to place individual songs on a page within your website. Also, Myspace allows for a lot of options in the area of customization and Facebook really does nothing of the kind. Unfortunately, in some cases, Myspace users load their pages with way too much stuff that lengthens the loading time of their profile page. I suggest that you try to avoid loading too much onto your myspace profile page, in order to keep the loading time down.

I think that the long loading times of people’s profile pages are one of the contributing fators in Myspace’s loss of users. Probably, the site that benefited most from Myspace’s user exodus was Facebook. However, Facebook offers nothing in the area of features for a band. They don’t offer their own music player and have no real customization options. Their biggest advantages are the loading time of pages, simple navigation and the number of users, which is growing at a phenomenal rate.

It’s fairly easy to post links and other things on your Facebook profile too. If you have a lot of friends or fans on Facebook, you can increase your visibility significantly. You can also have RSS feeds imported into your Facebook profile. Myspace allows you to use an RSS feed from your profile page on their site. So you could import your Myapce RSS feed into your Facebook profile. Make a single post on Myspace and it will appear on your Facebook profile too.

A lot of bands these days are using a Myspace profile as a website. I’ve seen some reserve a domain name and just have it do a redirect to their Myspace music profile page. Even though I have my own website, I have a Myspace profile page. I use the same background on my Myspace page that I do on my website, as a form of branding.

I post a link to the songs I have uploaded on my Myspace account on my Facebook page. I’ll wait a few days and then post a link to a different song. I have a regular Facebook profile page as well as a fan page that I do that on. It works rather well, I must say. In your Facebook profile, you are permitted to list links to your various sites. I link to my Myspace account, I link to the sites where I do my articles through and the many other websites and accounts I have online.

Another plus of working with the two sites is that you have the potential to be seen by more people. You have access to the user base of both sites. The thing that you will benefit mostly from, as a musician, is a high level of visibility. The higher your level of visibility, the greater your potential for success. That’s why I try to work with a number of websites. I’ll increase my visibility through writing websites, music websites, a number of different social networking websites, YouTube and so on. I also have my own websites that I created myself, since I do web development as well. I try to integrate them all into what I’m doing and try to simplify things as well. I even have some of my Facebook fan pages set up to automatically send my Facebook posts out as a tweet on Twitter. That way, I don’t have to do a post on both sites for the same thing. Just one post on Facebook will appear on both sites.

There may be a number of other sites you can work with too, other than the two I concentrated on in this article. Each site will have its own advantages. But as far as Facebook and Myspace are concerned, One is where the people are and the other is where the features are.


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