Guest Post: How To Find Your New Favourite Band – Part III – Facebook

This is the third and final part in Indiescreet’s guide to finding your new favourite band.

This is a guest post by Andrew McMillen, a music writer based in Brisbane, Australia. Andrew is coordinating blog content for an Australian music event, One Movement For Music, which debuts in October 2009. The blog at OneMovementWord.com contains interviews with artists and speakers appearing at the event, Australian music news, as well as guest posts exchanged with the likes of Creative Deconstruction‘s Refe Tuma.

This post takes a more in depth look at one of the most upcoming ways to find your new favourite band which I highlighted in part one of the series, Facebook.

Accept, Decline, Maybe?: How Facebook events have changed music promotion

In this guest post, I’ll analyse the trends I’ve noticed with regard to event promotion: from the taping of flyers to power poles and print advertising tactics of old, to the adoption of online networking sites to target web-savvy fans.

I first started seeing bands play live in Brisbane, Australia in February 2006, as soon as I was legally able to enter licensed venues at the age of 18. A little over a year later, in June 2007, I applied to begin reviewing live bands for a couple of local publications, as I was confident enough in my critical writing ability and gauged that I’d attended a sufficient amount of shows to warrant credibility. Lately, I’ve been thinking about changes to the ways in which my friends and I become aware of music shows – otherwise known as gigs – happening in our city each week.

In 2006, the majority of my knowledge of upcoming gigs was informed by local street press; free, advertising-supported newspapers distributed to record stores and live music venues across the city each week. Armed with street press knowledge and near-daily MySpace bulletin checking to see which of my band ‘friends’ had announced national tours, I was among the most socially-aware of my musically-inclined friends.

In 2007, I made two significant changes to my web habits: I began adding shows that I planned to attend to my Last.FM events calendar, rather than just using the site for scrobbling my listening habits. In addition, I joined Facebook, which was reaching critical mass among my peer group; clearly, the Facebook trend in Brisbane, Australia was a few years behind the US adoption rate.

Two years on, and I’m still a heavy user of both sites. Surprisingly, Last.FM uptake among the music fans within my city has increased at a glacial pace; add and attend enough events on the site, and you’ll see the same couple of dozen usernames attached to each show. I’ve attended shows alongside thousands of fellow music fans, while the event page shows a mere dozen attendees, and often wondered how many people would use the Last.FM service were they aware of its existence. It could go either way: my primary purpose of using the site’s event calendar is to keep track of my social (and semi-professional, as a music critic) life, and I feel that this kind of usage could easily be seen as useful by my fellow gig attendees. At the same time, I can see how the spontaneous could attach little value to planning gig attendance months in advance.

Turning to Facebook; I’ve noticed a significant change in how musicians and promoters use the service to spread awareness of their events. Owing to the friendships and connections I’ve made in the last two years while writing about bands on local, national and international levels, I now receive invites to music-related Facebook events on a daily basis.

Meditate on that for a moment. Where two years ago I gleaned the majority of my gig-awareness from street press and haphazard MySpace bulletin-checking – that is, by voluntarily seeking out the information – I now have targeted invitations appearing in my primary social hub, Facebook. While the medium has changed, the method has barely; the main difference is that event invitations are flagged for my attention within Facebook’s user interface. Compare this to MySpace’s antiquated system of ‘if you missed the bulletin, you missed out’, which was a reality if you were following a couple of hundred bands who were all regularly posting bulletins in an attempt to be heard above the noise.

While it’s unlikely that the decades-old promotion tactic of taping gig flyers to noticeboards and power poles will ever die out, consider that event promoters in 2009 have it easier than ever before. In my experience, taping flyers and paying to advertise in street press have both been usurped by the Facebook invitation. This tactic allows event promoters to build awareness of their events by directly targeting toward those who’re ostensibly interested – since, in many cases, the Facebook user has chosen to join a group or fan page that’s relevant to their interests.

Compare this method to the old models of power pole-taping and street press-advertising, which were comparatively indirect: instead of inviting an explicitly interested group, you were broadcasting to the masses. Where the old model was difficult to measure your return on, as promoters were usually unsure of a gig’s attendance rate until the night of the show (besides sold tickets, of course), Facebook guest lists now act as a (mostly) reliable indicator of exactly which fans plan to attend which show. Although, savvy users and promoters have probably since realised that responding to an invitation with a ‘maybe’ is a near-certain, but polite ‘no’.

At the same time, the ease with which event promoters have access to an audience has lent a quality of disposability to Facebook invitations. If you’re connected to several hundred people and a couple of dozen interest groups, you’re bound to be receiving invites on a daily basis, as I mentioned earlier. From within the Facebook interface, it’s easier than ever to instantly assess each social invitation on face value – that is, without clicking into each event for further details – and make a snap decision as to whether you’re interested or not.

While the ease with which you can dismiss invitations may be somewhat frightening to those who’ve invested countless hours in venue booking and event preparation, I maintain that the Facebook-enabled method of promotion is still superior to the old model of power pole and street press advertising, at least for shows on a local level. Rather than sitting, waiting and hoping that people will show up to your band’s gig on the night, it’s advantageous to engage with a highly-mediated audience and leverage the opportunities offered by social networking sites like Facebook and Last.FM.

Discussion points: how do you become aware of gigs in your city? Have your habits been influenced by social networking sites?

Written by Andrew McMillen.

You can contact Andrew via email or Twitter.

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