In a previous post, “Great Facebook Bandpages with RootMusic and ArtistData” I explain how I made my Facebook fan page for The Horrorist so pretty. Last night J Sider the CEO of RootMusic did a live walk through of their service on Ustream which I have embedded above. If you have used the service please leave a link to your Facebook fan page in the comments so I can check out your design and music.

“J Sider, our CEO, is going to demo how to set up and optimize a BandPage. He’ll start from scratch and give you the inside scoop on all the new features so you can get the most out of your BandPage.” – RootMusic

For more info: rootmusic.com

I’ve never set up a Facebook Fanpage for my own music (The Horrorist). When I originally joined Facebook it was reluctantly because MySpace was still a living community and it seemed redundant. To top it off the music features in Facebook were seriously lacking. Two external services, one which ties into Soundcloud have changed my mind.

RootMusic helps you design a proper “Bandpage”. It pulls your music from SoundCloud and allows you to make something actually album cover like. In other words your not stuck in tiny font slash baby blue Facebook land. RootMusic also easily pulls in Vimeo, Youtube videos, photos from your Fanpage, and your Twitter and RSS feeds.

Lastly, it has integration with ArtistData. ArtistData takes your show dates and puts them all over your social media sites (Facebook, MySpace, Eventfull…) so you don’t have to do the repetitive task yourself.

For a much more detailed review of RootMusic check out this write up on TechCrunch titled, “Musicians – This Is How You Create A Great Looking Facebook Page”: click here

The Horrorist Facebook fan page: listn.to/TheHorroristmusic

Today I have am asking you guys for a bit of help. Normally a Google search is all I need to find out anything I need to know but I’m a little stumped on this one. I joined Facebook before they had “Fan Pages”. So like with MySpace when people who liked my music wanted to friend me I gladly obliged. I did set up a Facebook Group but I could not simultaneously update my profile and the Group so it was useless really. Today I have a lot of Facebook friends.

Here is the problem I am having: I get a lot of emails “to the members of” pertaining to an upcoming techno event. I never joined to be a member of any of these groups/events. Some of the emails are from actual friends (like Reade Truth). I don’t want to unfriend him. I only want to stop receiving those types of event notifications from him. Some of the emails are from people I friended who I didn’t know (thinking they were fans). I could unfriend them but if they are genuinely interested in following my updates I don’t want to be rude. Lastly, I get “to the members of” event notifications from people who are not my friends at all.

I’ve gone into My Account -> Notifications and unclicked everything I can imagine would be causing the issue. I set up some Gmail rules so Facebook notifications skip my inbox and go into a Facbook folder but I still have to weed through 15+ “to the members of” emails per day. So what’s really going on here? Any help would be appreciated!

By the way you can find me on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/oliverchesler

photo credit: Francois Bouly

MySpace is about to change in a big way. Next month they are going to open up their API to developers.

An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.” – Wikipedia.org

This means that individual programmers and large corporations will all be creating thousands of mini programs and widgets that you will be able to add to your profile. This is similar to what Facebook has done but this is MySpace and MySpace is for musicians. Finally you will be able to add RSS feeds to and from MySpace pages. RSS is a great way of sending information on a page to another website or email newsletter. Imagine all the nice comments you get on MySpace appearing on the side of your WordPress blog. Geotagging applications, flickr, mini online stores like Spreadshirt (sell your band’s T’s), and ridiculous things like Dogster will all soon be available to MySpace users. I imagine there will be a host of applications designed to help you sell and promote your music.

For further reading on MySpace’s big change check out Techcrunch’s article “Counterstrike: Murdoch, DeWolfe Announce MySpace Platform and New Privacy Controls” and on Mashable.com “Murdoch Makes it Official: MySpace is Going Open“.

So without further ado I present you with my MySpace page: www.myspace.com/oliverchesler If you leave your MySpace page in the comments I will go check it out and let you know what I think. So what’s your MySpace page?

photo credit: swanksalot and freekorps