So, you still are using Myspace, right? That’s cool, it is still a very powerful and useful resource. The other day I took what Mike Real said on Twitter and started writing about frustrating things artists do on Myspace. Well, all those damn videos on your page is another!
What is the real reason you have a Myspace page as an artist? To get friends? To read updates? No, it is to showcase your music, and allow fans and potential fans to interact with you all the time. It is the place where we come to hear you.
Like many artists out there, you probably have made some Youtube videos. If you haven’t started, you need to. This gives your fans another way to interact with you, and many just like seeing you, rather than hearing you. It’s good to change it up a bit.
Adding video to your page is simple and easy, and adds more character to your Myspace page. But once you have built up an impressive video collection, please don’t add every single video to your page.
For starters, it can get messy and unorganized. Once you have 10-15 videos on there, you can begin to lose the format of the page. I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to pages and artists have all these videos on there, all over the place. In no particular order, they seem thrown onto the page. Not good!
Second, that embed code that you have added to you page does just that, it EMBEDS the video there. The video itself is not a part of the page, it is hosted somewhere else, like Youtube. Every time the page is loaded, each one of the videos needs to be loaded too. Having 10-15 videos trying to load at the same time can cause some errors, or make your ENTIRE page load extremely slow.
Slow Loading
Slow loading is where I wanted to get in this topic. As an artist, you do not want your fans to have to wait 5 minutes for your page to load. Granted, videos aren’t the only thing that can cause your page to load slow, we will discuss that in another topic, but they can and do.
Majority of us are moving fast on the web. We are clicking through pages, and if you are like me, you may have multiple browser tabs open. I am not spending 5 long minutes waiting for all your Javascript code to load so I can listen to your music. It’s just not happening.
We now live in a world of DVR where we can skip through commercials. Well folks, your 5-minute-page-loading is a commercial, and I’m not waiting around for it!
Organize
You want to make your page as user friendly as possible, and that means being organized. So I would suggest that if you have a bunch of show footage, to create a playlist called “Show Footage”, and add those videos to it.
You can then go to your Playlist section on Youtube, hit Edit Playlist Info, and grab the embed code for that one playlist. Now you will only have 10 of the 15 videos in one player.
It makes sense if you think about it: Fans are only going to watch one video at at time and then move on. The embedded playlist allows them to easily scroll to the next one, or just browse through the videos. And chances are that if they are looking for a specific video, they will go to your Youtube page anyway.
Conclusion
Having a bunch of videos is not a bad thing. What is bad is having a bunch of videos on your Myspace page, making it hard for fans to access other content.
I will keep saying that simple is better. People like simple. Complex things are annoying. Youtube playlists are simple and will keep your page clean and organized.
This is the second post of a short Myspace Music Page Series. Please continue to check back for the latest articles, or sign up for the newsletter to receive additional heads up!
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