Artistic Pursuit

If you’ve had a chance to talk with musicians, writers, directors, photographers, or other artists that have taken a crack at promoting their content on MySpace, you have probably heard varying accounts of measured success. The truth of the matter is that very few people will ever be successful at selling their music, film, artwork, photos, or books on MySpace. Why are so many people unsuccessful in generating income from a site that boasts over 100 million subscribers? Let me provide you with a few simple answers.

MySpace is a social-networking website that promotes artists that have already “made it”. In other words, you won’t find an amateur band or director on the front page or landing page of the music or film section. For you writers, models, photographers, and graphic artists out there, your best bet of getting noticed is to join a group or write a blog. Strangely enough, they don’t openly promote that type of content on their site. So how does one get their content noticed by industry professionals? You have to follow the same steps everyone else followed before MySpace ever existed. You have to work hard to promote yourself.

I have to believe that I have seen it all when it comes to promoting profiles on MySpace. The quick and dirty way to get noticed is to make the equivalent of a cold call. This process involves going to someone’s profile that you do not know and just adding that person as a friend. That person may or may not accept the request for friendship, but if they do, then you have a warmer prospect. Will this person ever buy a CD from you or ask if they can buy prints of the photos you are showing online? Your chances are probably better in winning the lottery than having that person buy something from you. However, there’s always a chance.

Another way to promote your profile to others outside of MySpace’s blogs, forums, and groups is to invite someone to be your friend. Within the invite, you can include a message explaining to them just why they should accept your invitation to be your friend. If they accept the invitation then you have a much warmer prospect. Now, your chances of selling them something may have increased slightly to a most-likely-not scenario. Obviously, this is much better, but still not good enough. With this warmer prospect you may be able to cultivate a friendship over a number of months and get them to buy something from you as a friend. This is when you move into the “there’s a small chance they might buy something from me” stage.

Getting someone motivated enough to actually send you money though is an entirely different story. If you become too pushy, they will probably realize that you are more a salesperson than their friend and they may block your profile – putting all of your months of tedious work to befriend them to waste. Let’s not also forget that many of the people on MySpace don’t have the money to buy something from you. The demographics of MySpace may no longer be heavily tilted toward just teenyboppers and college-age students, but they still make up the majority of people that will accept an open invitation of friendship from people they don’t know without questions.

Now, suppose you are successful in being able to sell someone something. Let’s use a CD for the time being, since music is one of the major types of content promoted on MySpace. You are able to sell the CD that you paid $2.00 to duplicate (not including studio costs and everything else) for $15.00. You spent over 100 hours online befriending someone to make $13.00. Let’s just use 100 hours for simple arithmetic. That means that you made about $0.13/hour. When you add in all of the studio costs, manufacturing costs and everything else, well it’s about time to start looking forward to a tax write-off for the New Year. The plain and simple fact is that you need a lot of publicity to make money on MySpace. This brings us to our next point.

Myspace promotes big name artists. We already established that. So, if you’re not a big-name artist, how do people find you? How do you tap into the 100 million members plus that are available to you? I think the bigger question is how do those people find you out of a pool of 100 million other people? The simple answer is that they don’t. Unless you can make yourself known to these people, almost all of them will never find you. They don’t know you exist and they don’t care if you exist. It’s a hard fact, but it is the bottom line. You have to do all of the work to make yourself known to prospective buyers.

So, if you’re trying to make a name for yourself on MySpace, then I guess the answer to the question we posed in this article is a resounding yes. MySpace is definitely a waste of time for most independent artists. Notice that I use the word “most”, because just like the lottery, you can always get lucky. If, on the other hand, you are simply trying to connect with other artists and aren’t worried about making money so much as making friends with like-interests, then MySpace might be a good place for you. That being said, I hope that anyone who is serious about his or her work is trying to make a living in it. There is no better job in the world than doing the job you love day in and day out.

Shelton Alexander is Associate Editor for Artistic Pursuit Magazine You can find more interesting information on his website http://www.artisticpursuit.org