What's the best online site for bands post-MySpace?

Amanda wrote a book on using MySpace as a central part of your music marketing - and it was, even just two short years ago.

Sure, other things were sneaking up and stealing traffic from it, but you still had to be on it.

Do you now?

It's kind of up to you  - as we've looked at in various posts in the last few months.

Everybody is saying that MySpace is dead - and that may well prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The key for me is that there is no longer any interaction there. It's so full of spam and devoid of any human interaction (now that all the everyday users have bolted), that it seems pointless to focus any effort on it.

However, there is still traffic - see this report from Ignite Social Media. Sure, it's fallen off a cliff, but it's still huge. So, that, plus the way that Google still ranks MySpace so highly, means that I would advise every band to maintain a profile for now, with an email widget to collect fan's details and current music and tour dates. It's an EPK that you should now set and forget.

Don't forget as well that MySapce is a tool for bands to use to find gigs, promoters and other industry help - you can still trawl it yourself to uncover other bands you can play with and venues to play at, but that is truly about it for now.

BUT, point your fans eleswhere whenever you can!

And that's where these two posts come in.

They both look at whether there is a replacement site - and the answer is that there isn't!

You need to maintain your own site and a profile wherever your fans might find you and want to interact - but keep it manageable. I'd say no more than 4 or 5 where you have a full-on presence.

This piece from AltPress espouses the multi-part approach:

“So as an artist and as a platform, you want to create the most convenient user experience,” he says. “This means the least clicks, the least bugs, the least scrolling, the least clutter. I think the combination of Facebook and the three hosting services earlier mentioned do a great job at that.” The nature of the internet tends toward decentralization, so a site like Myspace—which was at one point the one-stop shopping portal for music fans and bands—was bound to become fragmented. “What we see now with Facebook is not a centralized approach,” says Grasmayer. “It's the integration of fragments: YouTube, Bandcamp, Twitter, SoundCloud... they're all fragments put together.”

Whereas, this piece from MetalSucks backs Bandcamp as the real alternative.

Read them both and take their opinions on board, but remember that you need to be where your fans are. Go to them rather than expecting them to come to you.