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.