How many ways to market your music

I have been away for sometime and apologies for that, but I had some time to think about marketing your music. People say do blogs, do websites, do MySpace, do Facebook....do everything.

Now I don't know about you but I am sick and tired of every new website idea (Facebook is an idea that is based on MySpace, just a different version) coming out and people jumping on the band wagon and then wreaking it for the rest of us by over competition.

MySpace is a great way to market your tunes, but there are so many bands there and so many commercial bands that it is getting harder to do anything now. People are jumping on each others pages and leaving comments and joining as friends just to get you to do the same to them.

The blogs are just as bad. First you have to come up with something regular and either controversial, stupid, lies, or whatever. Then you have to jump around on other peoples sites and leave a message and a back link.

Now you have to build your own website, furnish it with info, make tunes for it, host it, and put up a newsletter on it...

Now I know for a fact that I don't have that much time. I can not do everything at once because I am human.

If I interacted with my fake friends on Facebook, left messages to all my competitors on MySpace, wrote about my dinner in a blog and posted a newsletter that is trying to get people to buy or read...when am I going to get the chance to do all of that?

If you post a blog message it needs to be regular and interesting otherwise it is useless. With millions of blogs out there you will only look at a couple regularly. The others you will only find for that one thing you searched on Google for. You need to promote it like a website, you need to "decorate" it like a website. So why not build a website?

So get a website, host your own blog and newsletter on that site, so you keep all of the traffic to your site.

Community sites are very much in the now. But ultimately the site that you host with owns all your traffic. If you go into Alexa.com (website stat and info site) and type in your site www.facebook.com/mysite it won't really come up as Facebook owns you. More traffic to them the better they become...they all follow this simple idea. So the best way is to reverse the flow of traffic, make them work for you.

Get a MySpace or Facebook page and then dedicate a certain amount of time per week for updates and promotion, but keep to your time limit, keep to your main website.

Far too long have marketing types stated that have only these sites and you will be minted, maybe so then, but when it comes to sustainability, growth and development then having your own site is the only way to go.