While spending some time on Myspace this past week, I took a look at what other artists are doing nowadays with their band pages. I wanted to take the time to customize my Myspace music page with more current tools other artists are finding helpful. I came across Soulja Boy’s Myspace page and saw he was using this chat application called Chatango.

I am not a fan of Soulja Boy, however, his use of social networking and reaching out to fans is commendable.

Chatango allows you to add a real time chatroom to your Myspace page. The chat shows the number of people on your page in real time. There is no download required, and the chatroom is ad free which is awesome. Once you customize it with your color scheme, a code is generated and just drop it in a section of your profile.

The reason I like the thought of the chatroom is due to the recent success of Twitter. The reason I enjoy Twitter is because of its real time response from followers, quickly being able to chat with your new friends. If you are going to use Myspace to promote, this chat room can help personalize your messages to your new users.

Secondly, what Soulja Boy did a good job at was placing the chatroom next to a list of his other profiles for Twitter, Youtube, and Bebo. If people are going to be chatting, its great to give them some important visuals. I am going to try this approach and place our latest album next to the chatroom or a mailing list sign up form.

Take advantage of followers visiting your page. Chatango is a great start: you are creating a reason for people to stay on your page and chat with others about your music while at the same time creating a call to action for your other profiles and projects.

Sometimes the simplicity of web tools is refreshing and brings back the main focus on Your Message.

As I used Myspace recently, I came across Myspace music profile pages that had cleaner looking designs. I used sites before like Strikefile where you basically customize every section of your profile, and change things such as table border and color scheme. This time around I wanted a clean layout where the customization was minimal and the look stands out.

DesignMyspace has 25 free layouts for your Myspace page. The difference with this site than many of the others is they have several layouts with clean, defined headers that could aid any musician in describing their music.

There are instructions for those new to Myspace. The rules stay the same, Copy and Paste their code into your Bio Section and you are ready to go. From there, just replace their text with your text in the appropriate sections found in your code.

The main reason I liked this was because I wanted to promote our band blog and other websites, along with other networks such as Twitter in the header. The layouts load quick, look great and allow for a better way to spread your marketing message.

Myspace Music’s recent relaunch gave users alot of new features to promote their music and add to its viral ability. Fans can now create playlists on their profiles and Myspace offers a huge catalog of major and indie labels to basically stream music from. The new layout adds to the power of music marketing that will create a new way to promote various artists and group members for free.

Within the paid arena, Myspace Advertising offers another form of targeting potential customers. The advertising program lets users create their own banner ads and then choose demographics they are interested in. For instance, target your niche of music according to customers based by gender, geographical area, age or whatever information is provided by fan pages. This is where you can determine which target audience is supportive of your music. As a musician and marketing manager, you have to love the fact of basically creating test groups.

Step 3 of the setup process states that “you will never experience any unanticipated costs” because you basically set your own budget. There is a $25 minimum which is needed to begin. The system works similar to Google’s Adwords where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

With the millions of indie bands and artists out there, you must find different paid options to promote your music. I will begin testing this advertising very soon to see if it proves beneficial. Many indie bloggers out there feel that the Myspace Monster is knocking out the indie movement, I feel lets keep the indie movement alive and work all angles in this digital world of distribution.

Myspace is a great social network to get your music heard in a quick manner, potentially leading to sales. When you sign up for Myspace, you have the option to sign up for a normal profile page or a band page. This is actually a good thing for you from a marketing standpoint.

One of the main drawbacks with only having a Myspace music page is that many people don’t add bands to their friend’s list, denying your friend request. Creating a normal myspace profile page will allow you to not miss anyground.

As a musician or artist, you want to add as many friends as possible to your account. Create your two profile pages, such as one for you as an artist and save the music page for your band This is where you can use your regular profile to add those friends. The point is to add as many fans as possible and this lets your 2 profiles cover that ground for you.

You can still customize your myspace page and add a music player to showcase your work. Here are three sites with ways to customize your page and add a flash player.

1. MyFLashFetish
2. Your Pimp Space
3. Project Playlist

A Myspace music page is a great asset for every musician. Customizing your Myspace Music page is very easy with all the free tools out there.

The one thing I make sure I try to keep monitoring is the number of things I add to my profile. I want people to listen to my music and don’t want them to wait for my page to load because I overloaded it with too many videos or pictures. You can judge the connection for yourself when you login and check your profile. Just food for thought.

The profile editors make it easy for you to add these changes to your band page by giving you a code that they generate. Once you get the code, you paste it into a section of your profile such as in the “About Me” category . I have compiled a list of 9 Myspace profile editors that make customizing your music profile simple.

1. Ultimate Myspace
2. Pimp My Profile
3. Real Editor
4. Myspace Toolbox
5. Codes to Go
6. Strikefile
7. Myspace Code
8. Html Codes
9. Nuclear Century

Sometimes using these editors may be more than you may want. Lets say for instance you just want to move your music player or use an image you have as a background. For this scenario I like to use PimpWebPage because they give you specific codes for just those requests. They also follow the same guidelines, cut and paste.

Please feel free to let me know what other cool sites get the job done for you.

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