Is the website of the musical artist dead?
Much has been written about the way the social networking sites are changing the music industry (e.g. 1, 2, 3), and it would be difficult to deny that the emergence of social networking has drastically altered the way that musical acts represent themselves (or get represented) on the Internet.
The World Wide Web gives artists precious opportunity to project their identity, inform and excite fans, and advertise themselves to potential fans. While traditionally a band would typically rely on its own website for this, that reliance has given way to social networking. These days, bands seem more concerned with maintaining their MySpace profile than their own unique website, and there are many advantages to doing this:
- Fans music similar to your own have a greatly increased probability of stumbling upon your profile.
- Fans will make “friends” with you, allowing you to broadcast announcements and other content to them in any number of ways.
- It’s free, so you don’t have to worry about, for example, arranging hosting , or hiring a web designer (as no one expects your profile to look good).
…and there are also advantages for the music lovers:
- Profiles generally have the same elements and structure, so you don’t have to feel your way round a quirky navigational structure to get at the content you’re interested in.
- You get an enhanced sense of interaction with artists.
- You don’t always have to do the seeking to find new bands that you might like, as often they’ll seek you out.
So social networking is good for artists and music fans alike, but as you might expect, all this has left a bands own website with little point in existing. As a result, band sites are stuck in the past and a great source of examples of the failures of web design in the late nineties; splash screens, often Flash based, abound; many band sites are entirely Flash based; many favour artistic aloofness over basic usability, or even coherence; these sites spend a ridiculously high proportion of their life “under construction”, and if not under construction, they’re often left stagnant, and rarely updated.
So is there any point in bands maintaining an independent web presents, when they can keep there fans amply happy and have plenty of opportunity to attract new ones within the realms of social networking?
Maybe there is, but only if a band can show enough innovation to engage fans in truly original ways. Leading in this area (as in others) is American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails; the release of their 2007 album, Year Zero, was marketed using an “alternative reality game” comprised (mainly) of a network of websites purportedly from the future that supported the concept of the album. In a further move Nine Inch Nails have created a community website based around creating and sharing remixes of Nine Inch Nails songs. Both of these innovations have been eagerly ceased on by Nine Inch Nail’s fan base.
Although band websites in their traditional form are all but redundant thanks to social networking, the near infinite depth of the medium leaves plenty of room to create engaging experiences for musical audiences.
