Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
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).]
A Chat & An Exclusive Track From Jonah Matranga
This is a post that we’ve had in the works for quite a while. Back in May of this year, I sat down to chat with Jonah Matranga (ex-Far, Onelinedrawing) about social media in the music world. Matranga’s probably best-known, recently, for his duet with Holly Brook and Fort Minor (Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park) on a track called “Where’d You Go,” which spent much of the early summer of ‘07 atop the iTunes charts.
The exclusive track, an acoustic version of “So Long,” from the 2007 And album is available here.
Matranga’s next shows are in Portland and Seattle, later this month.
The video can also be found on LaunchSquad’s new YouTube channel.
