A few posts back I wrote that I thought MySpace was becoming the way to find new fans online, and several people wrote to me asking how my “MySpace strategy” worked. Today, Wired published a piece on how MySpace works to connect bands to fans.

Now YOU can learn the secrets of using “social networking” to find THOUSANDS of fans online! It’s all in my free e-book!

Heh. Just kidding.

So, um, my “strategy” is hardly a strategy. People sign up and list their favorite music, movies, books etc. So the idea is to search for MySpacers who like music that resembles yours. For example, many of my Garageband reviewers told me that some of my songs remind them of Guster. Okay, so I went to MySpace and did a search for all Guster fans in a 50 mile radius of my ZIP code. Then I sent a short, very nicely-worded invitation to be “friends.”

If you do this, be careful to mention in the invitation why you’d like to be friends (i.e. “hey, you like Guster? People tell me I sound like Guster and I’m right here in town. Maybe we should be friends!”). Some bands like to spam everyone in a ZIP code regardless of musical taste. I think this is a huge waste of time, and a lot of MySpacers find it highly annoying, trust me. When I first started inviting people, I had a few people write back thanking me for actually taking the time beforehand to find out if they’d even like my style of music.

It’s curious how effective MySpace can be, considering that the site takes forever to load, is frequently down or broken, hard to navigate, splattered with ads, etc. And yet, there’s been a hardcore contingent of MySpacers at every show since I started using the site. Why MySpace has succeeded where sites like Friendster and Orkut have failed, I don’t know.

ps: I don’t think I sound much like Guster, but when I sense a trend I go with it.

pps: I’m thinking of starting a separate blog to offload some of these music biz markety posts. I think about this stuff a lot, but I think it’s really only interesting to other aspiring musicians.

Previously: The View From 30,000 Feet

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