MySpace marketing is a tricky area to get right for musicians and bands. It’s very easy to waste time and effort pursuing new fans and listeners from across the internet without actually getting anywhere.

It’s hard to tell where MySpace is going and where it’s place will be in the next few years as inevitably the social networking landscape will evolve and develop further. Facebook and Twitter are arguably the most popular websites at the moment but with these two it’s quite difficult to accumulate new listeners on a large scale.

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, MySpace still allows you to send friend requests to people you don’t necessarily know and because of the nature of MySpace, people will likely accept. The only issue I see is that with millions of accounts on their system, there is a high chance that a lot of people no longer use their accounts preferring to use other social networks. This leaves musicians in a situation where they send 500 friend requests in a day and only 20 accept because you happened to have sent 480 requests to people who no longer use their accounts. When looking for new fans on MySpace, here are a few points to consider:

– You need to add people who are interested in your type of music. This helps you stand the best chance of gaining a new fan.
– You need to add people who actively use their MySpace accounts.
– The best scenario is to add people who are currently online or who have been online very recently. Chances are, if they are surfing the internet they may spend more time listening to your music.

So how do you send friend requests whilst covering all of these areas? Well, let’s say for example you are in a band that sounds like Green Day or Blink 182. What you need to do is visit their MySpace pages and select ‘View all of Green Day’s friends’. You’ll be taken to a page that lists all of their friends. Now if this band is popular, they will have hundreds of thousands of friends. Don’t worry, you’re not going to add them all.

What you need to do is select ‘New Friends’ from the drop-down menu at the top. You will then be presented with a list of 50 users who have recently added the band as a friend. By adding these users in particular you are targeting fans of your particular style of music whilst ensuring they are active MySpace users.

It’s worth having a list of 5 or 6 other bands similar to yours that you can do this with on a daily basis. Doing this alone should save you time and effort whilst ensuring your getting a decent return (in terms of friend numbers) for your efforts.