Patrick Woodward’s MILA project is an example of how musicians manage their presence on the web.
There is a personal blog post about creating and managing the work at http://www.patwoodward.com/2008/04/mila-album-on-web.html.
There is a page which is a hub for the work itself at http://milamusic.tumblr.com/.
There are a bunch of distribution points for getting the work in front of users and drawing listeners back to the hub, including Myspace and last.fm.
How did he get to this particular setup? He described the basic problem to me like this:
A few weeks ago I played the part, and created a presence on six sites. I was releasing nine songs incrementally and it struck me how inefficient and jumbled this experience was of updating the various presences.
His solution and mine are basically the same. In my case, http://blog.gonze.com/2008/04/15/soup-greens/ is the blog post about the project. http://soupgreens.com/ is the hub site. Spokes being used as distribution points include Myspace and last.fm.
How come there’s a blog post about the making of the music site outside of the music site itself? Because the music is a primary object and talking about the making of it is a distraction.
How come there’s a single hub for the work? Because of how inefficient and jumbled this experience was of updating the various presences
.
How come there are multiple distribution points? Because online musicians have to go where the audience is, in the same way that offline musicians perform for different audiences in different venues.
So this seems like a basic pattern that must exist all over the place, and which software for internet musicians can specifically target.
The hub and spokes analogy is a good one. I think it’s okay to have the multiple media of different sites to locate music, but the idea of a central hub is very good.
Ideally you’d use each of the spokes for the things it’s good at and defer everything else back to your hub. Myspace has that super viral friending thing down pat, so you’d use your Myspace presence mainly for that. And since all of these sites want the media and it’s always the same, you’d always defer that to the hub.
That makes sense to me. I never got a Myspace Music page, because I thought other sites provided better widget-able hosting that could be imported into myspace. I agree that myspace’s super-viral quality is great, especially when it comes to things like netlabels, which can easily get the word out to thousands more people than the excellent yahoo netaudio groups. I learn about people with kindred ambient/experimental tastes every month due to myspace.
I like the idea of the hub site being a glorified web log, because I come to believe that just as text circumvented flash, so, too, will simple clunky weblogs supersede “fully loaded” sites. Myspace’s curious genius, I think, is that realize that if you build a place where people can dump format and html code, then people will use it even if the interface is far from ideal. It’s like the old college-bulletin board in the middle of campus at university.