Across blogs and industry websites the ‘solution’ to saving the industry is framed in terms of finding better revenue models, looking at ways to make paying for music palatable to consumers. What this discussion does though is mask one of the last and certainly biggest opportunities to actually save the music industry.

Digital marketing gives us all the possibility to reconnect music fans and consumers to a love of music. Through years of neglect and abuse, the recorded music industry has looted and razed the goodwill and interest of people who like music. It baffles me that an industry based upon a voluntary and appreciative consumer base would go so outrageously far to alienate them.

The opening of Topspin’s digital marketing tools to a mass market and the abundance of useful and incredibly good value for money services like Rootmusic, Fanbridge and nextbigsound enable every artist to communicate and reward fans simply. The act of every artist striving to create a good relationship with their fans and listeners will be the single biggest contributor to saving the music industry.

As ‘digital music revenues’ diminish to nothing in the near future, there will be more artists than ever before and only a handful of less important indicators of success than record sales. The big problem we face as the music industry though is not that there will be no money in it; it will be that there is no interest… Imagine if you will that it’s 2017. 20 million artists in the world all online in some shape or form and people no longer care; music is just another thing that exists in life, like fruit… who cares who makes it?

This is where we are heading… Spin back to 2011 and the land grab occurring at the moment where artists see the big ‘direct-to-fan’ goldmine, where fans become figures and figures become equations ending in big $ signs. Emailing a fanbase twice a year to flog another shit bit of merchandise, ‘become a roadie for the day’ for £400 or vastly inflated postage costs. This is killing the music industry at a time when it should be being protected and nurtured. So what should we be doing?

In my opinion, let’s just stream music for near free. Then spend the rest of our time engaging fans, treating them with respect and reverence and aim to make every interaction as targeted and personal as possible. With every artist striving to create a good impression and relationship with fans, music will become something that people will immerse themselves in once again. That’s how we save music… one fan at a time.

The thing is, the MySpace brand is still worth something.  It may not be the most popular brand at the moment, but with a big enough makeover – and I mean BIG – there is still a chance that the brand could once again represent something valuable, especially to the music industry.

The MySpace platform is currently going through some fairly significant changes.  It’s becoming easier for non-geeks to create a decent looking page and, as such, we’re gradually seeing less and less of the 90s-style acid-trip-flashback-inducing monstrosities that MySpace has become famous for.

So the question is, if you had a few million to spend on MySpace (try to forget the fact that if you had that much money you probably wouldn’t spend it on a sinking ship!), what would you do with the platform to turn it into something that would be truly useful to musicians and their fans?

To kick things off, here are my thoughts on the subject:

First of all, let’s make one thing perfectly clear… “MySpace the social network” is dead.  I don’t think anyone would disagree with the fact that Facebook is the reigning king of social networks and we should all just accept that fact and work with it.

Which basically leaves us with MySpace as a platform for artists/bands/musicians to create a space online where fans (and potential fans) can find out the latest info and check out some media (audio, photos, videos).

The problem with MySpace, in my opinion, is that it tries to be “the place” for everything.  It tries to be “the place” you visit to listen to a band’s music.  It tries to be “the place” you visit to check out a band’s photos.  It tries to be “the place” you visit to read a band’s blog.  The fundamental problem with that is the fact that there are people doing each of those things much better than MySpace.

For photos, we can use any number of photo storage and sharing solutions; Flickr, Picasa and SmugMug, to name just a few.  For videos, again, we have a whole host of options, YouTube being the common choice, but there’s also Vimeo, Muzu.TV, Dailymotion, Metacafe and many more.  For music storage and sharing, there’s plenty of choice.  I think I speak for the whole Good Lizard team when I say that SoundCloud is our favourite.  For blogs, there are solutions that suit every need and level of ability; WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous all do what they do very well but, again, there are plenty of other options.

My point here is that, when there are so many great tools out there for doing all this stuff, why is MySpace trying to provide a sub-standard amalgamation?  Forget that.  MySpace should build a platform that allows all these tools to be plugged into it.  Imagine a page that features a blog feed from Tumblr, a photo feed from Flickr, a video feed from YouTube, a SoundCloud player, a Facebook widget and a Twitter feed.  Creating a MySpace profile like this would simply involve supplying the details of all your various accounts and specifying a few simple design preferences (maybe uploading a background or header image).  Once those initial steps were completed, the profile would maintain itself.  All the content would be automatically updated whenever content on those other platforms was updated.  Imagine only having to post your latest blog entry once.  Imagine only having to upload your photos, music and videos to one place.  How cool would that be?

You may be thinking, “But if I use MySpace, I can upload all my stuff to one website and be done with it.  If I use all these other platforms you’ve suggested, I have to go to several different sites to make all my stuff available“.  My answer to that would be, are you not using all these sites already anyway?  Are you telling me you don’t have a YouTube account, or a blog/website, or a SoundCloud account, or a Facebook page, or a Twitter profile?  Seriously?  Shame on you!

If you already have all of these accounts setup (and if I haven’t already made it abundently clear, YOU SHOULD!!!), wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to upload everything twice?

So what about looking at this from the point of view of MySpace as a business?  MySpace needs to make money, sure, and they do that by selling advertising space.  The site layout that I have proposed would involve a single page profile where everything is on that one page, i.e. no visiting another part of the site to read a blog post or watch a video.  So obviously that means fewer page impressions, which in turn means fewer ad impressions, which ultimately means less money for MySpace.  This is true.  My response to this is simple: MySpace as it stands will not last much longer.  That’s obviously just my opinion but one that I doubt many would disagree with.  With the kind of revamp that I am suggesting, MySpace would at least stand a fighting chance.  So, Mr MySpace, what would you prefer: A smaller amount of money or no money at all?  I know which one I’d go for.

What about you?  Do you think you could save MySpace?  Share you thoughts in the comments!

Thankfully, there are plenty of social media icon sets available for free all over the net.  So, without further ado, here is a selection of what’s available.

P.S. If you’d like to know how to put these images on your website/blog and make them clickable, check out our post on Basic HTML You Really Should Know.

Elegant Themes – Social Media Icon Set

Socialize – Part 1

Socialize – Part 2

Socialize – Part 3

WPZOOM Social Networking Icon Set

Furry Cushions Social Icon Set

Derelict Grunge Social Media Icons

Amazing Social Icons

Isometrica Social Icon Set

3D Vector Social Icons

Hand Drawn Doodle Icon Set

In this blog post, we’re going to look at some of the basic HTML tags that will allow you to create online content that you might otherwise need help to achieve.

Links

We’re all familiar with links.  They are fundamental to the way the web works.  They allow the users of a web site to navigate between pages, sections of pages or to external web sites.  The markup for a link looks like this:

<a href="about-me.html">About Me</a>

Let’s break that down:

Firstly, we have the opening and closing ‘a’ tags:

<a> ... </a>

Secondly, we have the href attribute.  This specifies the destination of the link.  The word ‘attribute’ is important; It gives the browser information that is related to the <a> tag.  For that reason, it sits within the <a> tag itself:

<a href="about-me.html"> ... </a>

Finally,we have the text between the opening and  closing <a> tags.  This is the text that is actually displayed on the page for the user to click on.  That’s it!  Simple, right?

<a href="about-me.html">About Me</a>

Images

Links are great and all, but the web would be a pretty dull place if it consisted only of pages and pages of text.  Thankfully, the modern web browser is capable of displaying all kinds of rich media, the most common being the humble image.  Images can be used in many, many ways, but the basics are always the same.  The markup for an image looks like this:

<img src="my-image.jpg" alt="Photo of me" width="250" height="120" />

Let’s take a closer look:

Firstly, we have our <img /> tag.  You’ll notice that this differs slightly from the <a> tag in the previous example.  With the <a> tag, we had an opening  tag (<a>) and a closing tag (</a>).  This was because we needed to display the link text (“About Me”) between the two tags.  However, with the <img> tag, we don’t need to display any text, so we instead use a ‘self-closing’ tag:

<img />

Next, we need to add some attributes to the <img /> tag to tell the browser what to display and how to display it.  The first, and most important, attribute is the src attribute.  This is where we put the URL/location of the image itself.  This can either be relative or absolute.  “What does that mean?”, I hear you ask.  Well, a relative URL is the location of the image relative to the current web page.  So if the image is in the same folder as the current web page, you would simply enter the filename of the image:

<img src="my-image.jpg" />

If the image was stored in a sub-folder, it might look something like this:

<img src="images/my-image.jpg" />

An absolute URL is the complete URL of the image. You would use this method if the image was hosted on some other server/website:

<img src="http://www.another-website.com/my-image.jpg" />

The next attribute is the alt attribute.  This is the text that you want to display if the image can’t be displayed for some reason (maybe the image file is missing or the user has decided to turn off images in their browser).  This should be something meaningful that actually describes what the user would have seen if the image had loaded:

<img src="my-image.jpg" alt="Photo of me" />

Finally,we need to tell the browser the width and height of the image (in pixels).  While most browsers will display the image at the correct size even if the width and height attributes are omitted, it’s good practice to always include them:

<img src="my-image.jpg" alt="Photo of me" width="250" height="120" />

Image Links

So we can create links and we can create images.  What about creating images that are links themselves?  If you’ve read and understood everything so far, this should be a walk in the park.  Quite simply, all we need to do is replace the link text between the opening and closing <a> tags with our image tag:

<a href="about-me.html">
     <img src="my-image.jpg" alt="Photo of me" width="250" height="120" />
</a>

When a user clicks on the image, they will be taken to the URL within the href attribute of the <a> tag.

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

Most web pages contain a fair amount of text.  Just like with printed text, we need to present that text in a way that makes it easy for the user to read it.  Among other things, this means breaking up the text into manageable blocks, or paragraphs.  HTML makes it really easy to break our text into paragraphs:

<p>My Name is Pete and I like HTML</p>
 
<p>I like HTML because it allows me to create attractive and user friendly web pages to show off my content</p>

By default, most web browsers will separate paragraphs by inserting a space between each of them equal to one line of text.

Sometimes, you may want to start a new line of text without ending the current paragraph and starting a new one.  HTML has a tag for this too.  It’s called a line break and it looks like this:

<br />

You’ll notice that, just like the <img /> tag, the line break tag is a self-closing tag (because it doesn’t contain any content).  A line break is similar to hitting the return key on your keyboard when typing in a standard desktop word processor.  It will not create a paragraph space like the <p> … </p> tags.

The line break tag should be used sparingly.  If you use line breaks to create all kinds of desired layout effects, your HTML markup will very quickly become messy and bloated.  Layout effects should be created with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), but that’s a tutorial for another time!

This is all great, but how can I try these tags out for real?

The great thing about HTML is that it is understood by your web browser.  You don’t need a fancy web server to play around with it.  So, I’ve included here a basic HTML template that you can use to create a web page for sharpening your HTML skills.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
	<title>HTML Practice</title>
</head>
<body>
 
</body>
</html>

Copy and paste this code into a plain text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS X) and save the file as test.html (actually, you can call the file whatever you want, so long as it ends with .html).  Then, experiment by adding your own HTML tags between the <body> … </body> tags.

To see what your creation looks like, simply open test.html and it should automatically open in your default web browser.

If you’d like to learn more about HTML, there are some great tutorials on the W3 Schools website.