About Music Videos on MySpace

History

In 2005 MySpace was sold by its original owners to Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Twentieth Century Fox corporation. Upon the sale, Murdoch launched the site's own record label, MySpace Records. The intention behind the move was to discover unknown talent through the site's MySpace Music channels. A variety of features were given to upstart artists with the intention of making self-promotion as easy as possible, including the ability to post copies of their own songs on their pages and the ability to upload their own music videos.

MySpace Music, and specifically the ability to have music videos in your profile, is an incredible tool for new artists in the way of self-promotion. According to official reports, over eight million artists currently use specialized music profiles on MySpace. Singers who have broken into the mainstream, like Lilly Allen, credit their MySpace Music profiles as a big part of their success.

The positive effects of a band or artist uploading a music video to their MySpace page are many. For starters, once it is uploaded, you can link to it from any other website on the Internet. You can put links to it on other social networking sites like Facebook or upload it to Digg or other sites that feature user-submitted news stories and use that exposure to get a massive amount of people to come to your page. Much like a YouTube video, you can also embed the video on other Web pages, or a message board post or something similar. This all can lead to a new level of publicity artists would not necessarily have gotten on their own.

Simply uploading a video to your profile, however, is not enough to make you a star. The idea is to link your video to as many different places (preferably heavily trafficked sites) on the Internet as possible, with links that lead back to your site. Only then will you start to see large amounts of traffic. Just uploading content to your site, while helpful in the long run, is not going to suddenly direct people to your profile. You have to get the word out in other ways.

A common misconception is that artists will get some form of payment when they become members of MySpace Music. This is not the case. Though pages can look professionally done with songs and music videos and photographs of the band and the like, they are still essentially just standard MySpace profiles. A band does not get paid to be a part, nor does it get a part of ad revenue or a certain amount of money for each person who watches the band's video or visits the page. The benefit for artists is to get their work out to people on a grand scale, and nothing more.