MySpace Major Label Music Artists Seeing Solid Traction on Facebook; Indies - Not So Much
Facebook’s Pages feature, which debuted only five weeks ago, is beginning to gain significant traction on MySpace’s four-year-old music platform, with some interesting results.
Based on a sample of MySpace artist Top Tens in three categories (Unsigned, Indie and Major-Label),major-label bands that have engaged fans in Facebook are seeing the greatest success in building a Facebook fan base, followed by independent label bands and unsigned bands.
For example, even though Alicia Keys and Nine Inch Nails (currently an unsigned artist) have similar-sized MySpace fan bases (Keys’ 400k to Nails’ 528K), Nine Inch Nails are only able to cultivate a fan base half the size of Keys’ on Facebook, proportionately speaking. Tila Tequila, another MySpace phenomenon (#1 in the Unsigned category with 2.4M fans) is also only about half as able, proportionately, as #1 MySpace major-label artist Chris Brown to build out a Facebook fan base.
The trend is fairly clear across the categories: mainstream, major-label artists are, proportionately, 2.75 times more able to draw fans on Facebook, proportionate to their MySpace fan bases.
50% of the current MySpace Top Ten artists in each category now have a Facebook Artist Page. A few artists, like Hawthorne Heights,
invented pages posing as people on Facebook, to get their bands on
Facebook before the Facebook Pages feature debuted last month. I was
unable to assess those numbers because Facebook won’t reveal them
unless you’re the artist’s "friend". Even if I were to use those stats,
the fan metric would have been unequal to how the other artists were
measured.
I was initially interested in investigating Facebook’s traction in the
music space because my new band, Reds, lacks a MySpace page. Even back
in 2003, when I first joined MySpace, I was very ambivalent about the
platform, mainly because I wasn’t wild about the look of the musician web pages - the bric-a-brac HTML was a little much for me. I can’t see a huge advantage, personally, to creating a MySpace page currently, but my 21-year-old drummer disagrees with me. Probably because a lot of his buddies are still using MySpace.
If my own Myspace Vs. Facebook musical orientation is in question, I wrote this post listening to Styx, Rush and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis on Pandora.
[One note about methodology, I had to estimate MySpace fan amounts for Kanye West and Yo Gotti (which I pencilled in at 1M and 100K, respectively) because they did not post this number on their MySpace pages. I estimated this based on the comment/fans ratio that held constant for similar Top Ten artists (same genre, same silo).]
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