You can do lots of things on the web these days if you have a band. Maybe too many things. I am in a couple of bands, and am trying to maintain a presence on the internet for these bands. This turns out to require quite a lot of work. These are the sites I’m currently using for my band Far Black Furlong:
- Myspace – obviously. Even though the design is pretty much broken and many sites are illegible, your band must be seen here.
- Facebook – not a lot going on, but I need to keep adding new stories so it looks like we are still going.
- Last.Fm – mp3s of all releases need to go here, and a biography, and album covers and so on. Quite handy, in that it shows you how often your tracks got listened to in the last week. By Last.fm users, obviously.
- Bandcamp – All songs go here too, and you can use it to sell your tracks (and physical product if you have it). You can embed the player widget for any track or album pretty much anywhere. Nice graphs to show you listen/visit/download stats.
- Stereofame – This site is truly annoying, and is a hell of a system hog. It does get your music heard, though. There is a surprising amount of decent music on here.
- ReverbNation – slightly annoying but very useful site. It keeps trying to get me to add live dates for the band, and we don’t (can’t, really) play live.
- Blog – I’m using WordPress (the free version). Very useful indeed, very easy to use. Can embed widgets easily.
- Soundcloud – another place to put MP3s for download or widgetting. Even the free version is very useful.
- Jango – an on-line radio service. You can get your music played on there (for a price) and get access to the people who liked what they heard. Only just started this, don’t know how well it will work for my band. Seems to be working well so far.
- Next Big Sound – gives you the stats for your band throughout the interwebiverse. They’re still coding the back end as far as I can tell, but it could be handy once it’s fully operational.
- Artist Data – takes your blogs and tweets and re-posts them to all the other places. Slightly useful.
- Twitter – I know it’s supposed to be the future of everything, but it’s pretty much impossible to generate new fans, or make money or do anything other than see what Stephen Fry had for breakfast. Can be entertaining – yesterday someone from Word Magazine thought I was a famous photographer. For about 3 seconds.
- Youtube – so many sites do a video search for each artist page, so it pays to have some kind of video out there, just in case.
I don’t even know if that’s all of them, but I’ve got to keep on top of it all, keep them updated with stuff, talk to your fans. It’s good fun.
What? Why Bother? 
Let me know how Jango works for you, it sounds like it has promise.
Jango probably works really well if you are a fairly mainstream-sounding act that fits well into a genre, like my act doesn’t. ‘Alternative/Alt.Rock’ is probably closest, except the last thing we do is rock. I have put us down as ‘world’ for a couple of days – with no noticeable effect.
The first week we were getting 1 in 5 would ‘like’ a track, and 1 in 10 would become ‘fans’. maybe is was the season of goodwill and everything, but we’re now down to 1 in 20 ‘likes’ and no new fans. But it’s less than a 10th of the way through, so really too early to tell.