One of the massive challenges facing the world of social networking and how it interfaces with marketing (in our case, marketing music) is the area of integration – simply put, how can information uploaded be spread across MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm etc. without us needing to add everything to all of them individually… How can the data from one site be output to be processed by another… The formats and web-standards are there for it to work in the form of RSS/XML, Microformat mark-up and feeds, but very few sites will ACCEPT information that way. Some output it – Reverb Nation generate RSS feeds of gig dates for artists, and last.fm generates ical feeds of the gigs you’ve added to your profile etc. but neither of them will accept input from an hcal formatted page…
Anyway, all of that stuff is lightyears away for the increasingly lumbering behemoth that is Facebook because they cant even get integration to work within their own f-ing site!!!
“What’s the problem?”, you ask, perfectly reasonably. Well, at the moment, there are number of tools for musicians on facebook, their ‘flagship’ idea being Pages – that is, public pages that you can create for a band, product, service, whatever. You create your band page, then folks add themselves as ‘fans’.
However, they also have an excellent app. for ordinary facebook profiles called ‘My Band’ – created by the lovelies at Reverb Nation, it puts your reverb nation player onto your facebook profile (note, not your ‘page’), and even has a separate page for each artist within facebook, and allows your friends to sign up as ‘a fan’. Can you see a huge crossover in purpose here? Of course.
“Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way of connecting the two?” Yes it would, good question, well done.
“Well, is there?” It would appear not.
And to make matters worse, there’s also no link between your Reverb Nation My Band app. fans on facebook and your fans that are actually on your Reverb Nation page.
So what needs to happen? Well, it would be great if Facebook did a proper hook up with Reverb Nation and started to allow embedding the ‘My Band’ player into the page – they could make it the heart of the page in the way that the myspace player is the thing that made that site work so well. That may well entail Facebook buying Reverb Nation – I’m not sure that the corporate side of the Facebook machine would be all that happy about that close a hook-up with a partner rather than a subsidiary – but either way, it’d make it work much better, and would definitely be a giant leap towards Facebook’s aim of finishing off MySpace… It would then mean that there would be proper integration between the embedded Reverb Nation widgets that litter all kinds of pages, and the Reverb Nation Facebook plug-in for fans.
For now though, here are the resources you need to get started, and have the stuff in place when it all starts. These are also the links to follow if you want to check out my music on facebook, and become a fan (which you’ll have to do at least three times for blanket coverage! :o) – you’ll need to log-in to Facebook to access any of the pages there…
My ReverbNation.com page
My Facebook artist ‘Page’
The reverbnation listener plugin for Facebook – for anyone else wanting to add my music to their page, to help spread the word.
If you’re on Facebook, please do add yourself as a fan.
There’s a glitch in it too – I set a page up on Sunday for Dan’s band, Amino and it set them up as a store!! Thinking I’d made a mistake, I deleted the page and did it again last night. I definitely selected BAND but it’s put them through as a store again. Great, a band with opening hours, parking and promotions!
Hey Whats up Steve ? I would love to get some help to get my Facebook Band page up and i have tryed sooooo hard to get like you have! i have iLike set up and everything good to go but i can’t finish it to get it looking like yours. please, please, please help me im going nuts…
Hi Stress,
what’s the issue? Post a link to the page, and we’ll see what we can sort out.
The main apps I’m using to make it look the way it does are MyBand which is the facebook app for bringing your Reverb Nation page into Facebook, and Posted Items Pro, which seemed like about the easiest way to get youtube videos into facebook…
Facebook is a bit of an organisational disaster, so don’t feel bad about struggling to work it out. It’s a bit shit 😉
Ok. thank you so much for helping me 🙂
ok here is my page link
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stress/42349246298
i have tryed soooo hard to add iLike as my application cause im an artist on there
http://www.iLike.com/artist/StressOfficial so i thought all the songs would transfer on 2 my facebook but NO! nothing there and im dead frustrated… so now… im uploading the Reverb Nation account so i can try that … please give me steps to all the way the page should be set up so my music is up there on the page.
also im an artist that goes by the name of Stress and i have tryed to upload my music thru the media player that they offer but they are saying i need to upload a pic of a proper ID like passport or driver licences and such but im artist with an character name so i dont know if that will work out which is tottally weird.
anyways i feel like im soo close maybe in few more steps from the help of you i will be on my way to success :).
thank you so much
Ok, the two iLike-driven apps that I’ve got on there are just ‘iLike This Artist’ which is just the button for people to click, and then one called ‘Songs’, which is what adds all the songs from iLike onto my page.
I didn’t bother with the official facebook song upload thing because there’s no way I’m sending them a scan of any document of mine. That’s insane.
once you’ve got a reverbnation account, add the MyBand app to your ordinary facebook page, and then add the myband app to your artist page, and link it to your reverbnation/myband account. Should be pretty straight forward…
good luck!
hey steve i have just sent you an e-mail to your
inbox please please help please :)! thank you
please help me! please
dude, chill… 🙂
I’ll have a look at it later when I get 10 mins.
don’t worry, you’re not losing potential fans by not getting your facebook music page sorted out on Christmas Eve.
haha 🙂
HEY guess what I GOT IT FIGURED OUT 😀
OMG i am soooo happy!
Thanks for your help…
if i ran into a problem i will hit you up 🙂
merry christmas
Hi Steve,
Couple of questions:
I’ve noticed your page has the genre and other details in the sidebar on the left, and not in the MyBand ‘tab’. How do you get the data to appear that way?
Also, which is the better app to use, MyBand or iLike?
Thanks for your help.
Cheers,
Steven