Here a question I have been asking myself over the past couple of months. For years the artist homepage has been the home base, the go to spot for people to find the latest information on their favorite artists. I myself have spent countless hours slaving our homepage design trying to find the right idea and concept that just worked for me and my music. When it is all said and done though does a homepage even matter anymore? The internet has matured a tremendous amount in just the past five years. Search has become the lingua franca so finding an artist has become more easy than ever.
When Myspace stormed onto the scene several years ago bringing with it the social ecosystem design for bands, it in some respects changed everything. The dichotomy of information changed from the listener seeking out the artist to instead the artist almost seeking out the listener. In the social networking ecosystem the information that the artist puts out is pushed to the user. There also seems to develop the insatiable need to get as many followers/fans/friends as possible regardless of how valuable they truly are. This is something that just was never really feasible with a traditional website. I myself have seen more traffic for my music with a blog style website than a traditional one, but even a blog to many extents is to slow these days.
There are now more social networking websites designed around music than ever before. Myspace is no longer the dominate player and arguably might not even be the best player if it was not for the fact of its large user base. Even complicating matters even more, services like Twitter are changing the game once again as they act as a platform to deliver information rather then a service. We are beginning to see services fold over onto each other as as post on to Virb for example can automatically update a band’s pages at Myspace, Twitter, Facebook and others. When people are actively spending their time on other services and not even necessarily visiting the websites of these services, does it not make sense to push our presence as musicians onto these services?
I guess that circles me back around to my original question. Is a homepage still needed? With the pervasiveness of all of these social networks that people presumably want to be a part off why would someone want to participate in the isolated island that a single band’s page could offer? Certainly if the band is big enough they could support their own social ecosystem around themselves, but for most of us that just isn’t possible. One argument could certainly be made towards the permanence that homepage offers. With the development of so many social platforms there are bound to be casualties in the process. Does an artist want to truly invest their time into updating all of these sites and at the same time what if they choose the wrong one, it goes belly up and much of their fan base, music and contacts are lost? Is the homepage relegated largely to operating as a portal for people to then branch out to the latest social network?
Lets her some comments and thoughts from musicians out there. Many of you that I see don’t have webpages. Those that do, how does your traffic and listens compare to what you get on a social network?
