I know that the term ‘social networks’ is perhaps one of the most blogged about in the entire history of everything in the whole wide world, but I am happy to add to that – after all, the very nature of social networks is that everyone can join in, isn’t it? For me, as a promoter for my little rock band and also as a promoter for my day job (a not so little symphony orchestra), one of the most frustrating things about Facebook and Twitter (more so the former) is the lack of integration of a music (or video) player in the pages. Sure, various externally based apps exist, but these often go wrong and even more frequently link to another website that links to another website where the user can listen to a snippet of the originally promised song. When I started learning about marketing, and more specifically websites, it was made blatantly clear to me that you have to keep people on your website whatever be the cost. There are shelves of books in libraries that are just about keeping people interested and it seems as though one of the most popular websites in the world is ignoring this rule.
Engaging the audience through audio and video clips on websites is easy enough to do, and has been done from the word go. I have a vague memory of setting up a website in about 1999 as a fan page for X-Files that had a midi version of the theme tune playing in the background, although the only people who saw this page were me, my mate Luke and my IT teacher who caught me updating it when I should have been learning about formulas in Excel. My point is, capturing the audience and keeping them entertained is key across all media and is so easy to do.
Matthew Park works in marketing at an arts organisation and is a singer/songwriter, as well as being a future-of-music enthusiast.