Woke up to this message from iLike in my inbox this morning.

We wanted our artist community to be among the very first to hear officially that MySpace has entered into an agreement to acquire iLike.

We’re sure you have a ton of questions, most importantly: How will this affect me or the artist/band I manage?

• First off, you can count on business as usual: The iLike Artist Dashboard, website and apps will continue to operate as always – except that they’re going to get even better in the weeks and months to come.
• Our friends at MySpace share our commitment to helping fans discover your content and connect with you online. Together we hope to make our social music discovery platform even more powerful. Most artists manage their online artist presence via a MySpace page and separately via the iLike Artist dashboard. These two dashboards give you access to fans across all the biggest social networks. It’s an obvious opportunity for us to integrate these services to give you easier technology and access to more fans. We expect to announce some cool new features and integrations in the future.

And that’s not the only big iLike development in the last few days. iLike is now enabling music fans who discover and share your music on iLike.com to purchase songs and albums (in MP3 format) in-page directly from us.

Our download service provides a smooth, immediate in-page purchase experience. Fans can sign up, enter their credit card, and download music without ever leaving the page they discovered your music on. We think the speed and convenience of our service will spur music sales.

We’re delighted to be selling music from all the major labels and hundreds of indie labels through our partnership with MediaNet. We’ve heard loud and clear from lots of independent artists who want to find ways to sell their music directly. We have nothing to announce about this yet, but your feedback has been heard, just give us some time.

Our MP3 download service is currently in Beta, meaning that it’s an early preview, we’ll improve it rapidly as we get feedback from fans and artists. We’ll also make it available on iLike’s applications on leading social networks. Our goal over time is to offer music fans the ability to impulse buy in-page from wherever they are.

Change is exciting, but we know it can also cause anxiety – even when the developments are good. We’ll continue to update you when there is anything new or noteworthy to share. We value your ongoing support and we welcome your feedback.

Sincerely,
Ali & Hadi Partovi, co-founders, iLike

I’ve had mixed success promoting my artists’ music with iLike but this is a good buy for Myspace. The big question everyone’s asking…what does this mean for iLike and Facebook?

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some research on Ariel Hyatt and her PR prowess when it comes to independent music. I was planning to do a feature in the next week or so about how much of an undiscovered gem she and her service could be for a struggling act or artist. I mentioned her (hopefully) influential article about Twitter from musicthinktank.com on the blog yesterday.

Unfortunately, Ariel just launched a new marketing program for herself that will probably guarantee her and her team will be so busy they’ll be turning away loads of work for months. If you’re lucky enough to get a spot in one of her publicity programs, take advantage of it as soon as you can. If you’re truly certain your act is ready to compete on a worldwide stage, Ariel will be able to help you take it to the next level as far as online media is concerned. Just make sure to give your project plenty of lead time – your album promotion should start at least 3 months in advance of your release date!

Want to know more about promoting your music online? Learn more from Ariel Hyatt’s CyberPR.

More of Ariel Hyatt’s resources:

Music Success in 9 Weeks

Roadmap to Social Media Success

Cyber PR Publicity Campaigns

Popularity: 23% [?]

I was cruising through some of Jimmy Shelter’s posts this morning. If you haven’t been to Jimmy’s blog recently, you should check it out. He has a great collection of resources for do-it-yourself indie music marketing.

In his Band Promotion Links IV post, Jimmy links to a really important article by Ariel Hyatt posted at musicthinktank.com (check it out). Ariel talks about Twitter, and how it’s a great tool to use for reaching new fans and making industry contacts.

Don’t underestimate the power of Twitter. If you happened to be watching Twitter’s election pages after Obama’s big win, you would have been amazed at the volume of ‘tweets’ that were rolling down the page, and the stories that were being told with just a few characters of text.

This is what you want to achieve with Twitter. No, I’m not talking about thousands of messages, but messages that help you tell a story about your act – to build a relationship with people who are following you and create a unique and interesting reason for them to care about who you are and what you do.

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Sitting down to write those first mind-racking band descriptions and introductions on your profile can be very hard. It involves a great deal of thinking, planning, and usually a lot of collaboration with the rest of the band, your friends and family members for ideas and the “right” thing to say. But, rather than worry excessively about what you want to say, you should consider what people want to read about your band.

New Fans and Innate Curiosity

When a new fan visits your site, they likely have three questions in mind:

• What kind of music do you play?
• What are you and the other band-members like?
• How does this affect me?

MySpace provides plenty of space and prompts for you to provide information about what kind of music you play and what kind of band you are. You can upload tracks for them to listen to, list your major influences, and create a series of mini-profiles with information about your band’s members. However, the third question is one of the most important and must be addressed carefully in the descriptions you write.

You might notice that many bands write a very long, involved profile discussing who they are, where they came from and what they see in their music. Other bands simply post a concert calendar and a short bio of 200 words. While a profile that is too long will simply bore readers, one that is too short does not address the question of “how it affects them.”

To address this question, you must write less with the “goal” of your music in mind and more with the “substance”. What do you do that is different from other bands and how do you interact with your fans? Fans want to know that you are an active, fun band. If you know you are going to be traveling a lot and that you will update your blog, respond to fan messages, and listen to requests, write that into your profile. If you want to hear feedback on a track or have a cool idea that you want to run by a large group of people, do it in your profile.

By combining the basic marketing information that all bands include in their profile – origins, influences, and aspirations – with the basic, interactive information that your fans want to hear, you can ensure they know what you want them to know while feeling like stopping by you profile has a positive effect on them.

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What do you do when your friend ignores you for a few weeks?

Hopefully, you forgive and forget because I apologize for being so slack on keeping up to date over here. I’ve been pretty focused on a few new music related projects (details coming soon) and this part of my life (the one that doesn’t pay) has taken a back seat. Continue Reading

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Recently one of my blog posts about how to keep up a good MySpace blog was featured on Knowthemusicbiz.com. I’m really pleased to see how fast that site is growing because it links together all of the best music business resources on the web, totally free. Most of the time, if you’ve got a question about something that has to do with the music biz – general and specific – you’re going to be able to find a few opinions archived at Knowthemusicbiz.com.

I figured I’d try out a Google Search box to make it easier to search for information on whatever topic you’re scratching you’re head about. You should be able to search maxlowe.net, knowthemusicbiz.com or the whole internet from here. I’m not 100% sure yet it’s going to work, but we’ll give it a few days and see what happens…

Enter your search terms

Web maxlowe.net knowthemusicbiz.com   Submit search form

Popularity: 13% [?]

You’ve probably heard the term “viral marketing” more than a few times in the past. It’s bandied about enough these days. It is an extremely important and highly viable means by which you can actively engage an audience well beyond your own. Unfortunately, it is also very hard to know when a viral marketing concept will actually be successful. It might take multiple tries and repeated trial and error to be sure something will work. Continue Reading

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At least that’s my take on the new MySpace music site reported to be taking shape in the New York Times yesterday.

According to the NYT:

Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends. They will also be able to download tracks to play on their mobile devices, putting the new site in competition with similar services like Apple, Amazon and eMusic. Continue Reading

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