What?  MySpace is your main presence on the Interwebz?  Your only presence on the Interwebz?  Well, then music must be your hobby not your business.

“But, we branded it with our look & feel and everything’s right there on that one page and it’s easy & free!” To that I say, then you still don’t consider your music a business … otherwise you would not rely on another company, owned by Rupert Murdoch no less, who doesn’t care a lick about your music to control all of your content & make money off of your content.  Plus, the fact that MySpace is a social network, a clunky & slow-loading one at that .. it is your content, but not your website.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe social networks are a very important part of a business and especially a small business like an Indpendent Musician/Band.  But, like all social networks before it & still yet to come it is only viable if people use it.  A better social network comes along .. people flock to it .. leaving the old one a virtual ghost town .. leaving you behind.

That being said, what a wonderful age we live in for the Independent Musician/Band!  With your time, hard work & very little money, you can control your business.  And who is going to be more passionate about it than you, well unless you involve that Fifth Beatle (read “Dear Musicians – Please Be Brilliant or Get of the Way”)?  If you’re not willing to invest those things into your business, how can you expect other people to?  Oh right, your talent .. because we all know the most talented people are always the ones that make the best livings.  I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions, but they’re not the rule.

All of this so far has really just been a commentary, not a how-to.  But the gist of building your online presence is to have a central location (your own website), your world headquarters if you will, then build your branches off of that, those branches being your social networks .. the top ones being Facebook, yes Myspace is still holding in there but falling, Twitter, & YouTube.

In other blogs, I’ll get more into the how-to of building your web presence and what are some of the good, free or cheap web tools out there that you can take advantage of ..