Can you capitalize MySpace?
This is a great question. It is something that was circulating in my mind before I released my album, and is still circulating now.
When I’m saying capitalize, I mean promote your music through myspace and make money out of it. So, let’s take a look to what happened with my project: Raskolnikov’s Dream.
My MySpace is http://www.myspace.com/raskolnikovsdream I joined it at January 11 2009. The day of this article is March 4 2009. This makes 52 days. In 52 days I had 8339 views and 2750 as of the time of writing.
This isn’t a bad number is it?
However, the other statistics are discouraging. I sold only 7 albums, I got only one friend on last.fm and 18 fans on facebook.
So, what is going on here?
My opinion is that these stats reflect the psychological profile of the average MySpace user. And let me tell you why. On CD Baby where I sell my CD, I checked the incoming links. Not one of them was from MySpace. Actually, not even one person in MySpace even tried to enter my CD Baby page. I had some people telling me that they would buy my album, but they didn’t.
On the other hand,on CD Baby i got about 200 visits and sold 5 albums there (the other 2 from a total of 7 were from my site). This comes to a whooping 2.5%, which doesn’t actually sound like a big number, but think for a moment that if, for example, I had the means to promote my music to 10.000 people (which actually isn’t such a big deal), I would sell 250 albums. If I had the the means to promote it to 100.000 people, then I would sell 2500 albums.
These numbers might not look like a big deal, but if you are an independent artist, they are. It is very difficult to promote your music to such a big audience, yet, if you sell albums, you get most of the profit yourself. Actually, if I sold 2500 or more albums a year, I could make a living, even though these numbers would be considered a failure if the album was released by a record label.
But, what causes the difference between CD Baby and MySpace? It’s simple. As I mentioned above, it all depends on the psychological profile of the average MySpace or CD Baby user. In MySpace, people are looking not to buy music, but to find and listen to music. On CD Baby, people go to buy music.
So, while I have only 200 CD Baby hits, I sold 5 albums, while on MySpace I have 8400 hits and I haven’t sold an album.
So, it all depends on the user profile. Surely MySpace is a great way to promote your band. Possibly, the greatest. It’s a good way to gain internet fame, and fans for your live shows. But, maybe, if you want to gain money from MySpace, maybe you should look elsewhere. 
