javascript:; Dirty Tricks: Myspace, Monsters and Profit - Part 1 ~ we ARE the music industry

Tuesday 10 August 2010

Dirty Tricks: Myspace, Monsters and Profit - Part 1


The subtitle of this book is "Easy online marketing strategies to get more fans fast".  I imagine this with a plethora of exclamation marks and ones after the title.

The author, Nicky (the knife) Kalliongis is apparently a respected industry insider. Having been strategist for EMI and Time warners as well as a respected producer for Whitney Houston, Air Supply, Run DMC, Faithless, Hall and Oats and Eros Ramazotti (there's more of those ones and excalamation marks). Now that in itself makes the whole premise of this book somewhat suspect to me - surely this is one of the very dinosaurs blindly struggling through the web 2.0 tar pits?

The book comes across as severely dated and very basic for everyone who's got any familiarity with the web. Some of the marketing actions such as using a newswire service like PR Web strike me as the actions of someone who doesn't really understand the viral buzz they keep talking about.

That the whole marketing plan centres around myspace, a now almost defunct medium is enough to get the alarm bells ringing.

Even when the book was intially released (2008) myspace was already on it's last legs ready for a kindly shotgun in the face care of Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp who took something they didn't understand and made it even worse filling it's pages with advertising and slow clunky loading applications such as Myspace chat and yet more adverts.

Despite that, as this graphic shows:




Myspace still has the third largest user base of any community (whether people visit there or not is another matter), so it's worth still signing up for an account - but surely a marketing strategy based around myspace is doomed to fail?

I was somewhat cynical during one of the chapters when Nikki talks about bots - tools like friend adders. It was my understanding that such things are a bit of an internet no no and always strikes me as being somewhat ill mannered if not downright Spammy.

Maybe i shouldn't discount the book - i'm certainly going to try some of the things that Nicky suggests but i think compared to Bobby Owsinski's book "Music 3.0" then this book is pretty slim on the ground.

However i'm prepared to put this aside for the sake of experimentation. For the sake of "fair and balanced" reporting i'm going to set up a band page and then try and find a bot which can process up to the recommended amount of friend requests per day and then link this blog to the page to see how much traffic is passed through to a site such as bandcamp where people can sign up for full quality versions for free.

Whenever i go on Myspace friend adder sites it always looks like I'm about to venture onto some dodgy Porn site.  I wonder what exactly the friend adder applications get from it all - information and access to your myspace passwords?

Part 2 of this post will look into the various friend adder options available...

By Jez with 1 comment

1 comments:

Nicky Kalliongis has not just been a respected insider but a over all respected music industry revolutionary, its how he thinks, i have heard Nicky talk about music and he is on the game big time, Clive Davis & all his people are top notch industry people NO ONE HAS COME CLOSE to even nearly when it comes to selling records.

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