I use facebook only as a passtime and place to find/keep touch with old friends. It doesn't look suited for music promotion.
I use soundclick and icompositions, but I don't care for promoting myself. I just need a place to upload my files to so I can share them with you people. I avoid visiting myspace because I find the pages too flippin messy: People always choose bad background-font color combinations and untidy layouts, I hate that place.

If I had to take a guess about their efficiency, I'd say you have to work really hard. I've been on soundclick for a couple of years or more. I must say I never get comments on the stuff I upload to soundclick and the few comments I have received were all from people I already knew and specifically directed to my page. In a similar way, I never actively look for random people's music.

If you need a free spot on the web to host files images and videos and write a few things about your work, soundclick and myspace are very well suited, but don't expect them alone to get you noticed. You will have to actively promote yourself and point people to those pages.

I'm also in the process of designing a web page to try and get some attention and hopefully get more people to review my songs on CD-baby & Itunes.

I'm going to use the personal web space provided by my ISP.

The thing I really need to figure out is how to increase the odds of my web page showing up in the first few pages of the average google search for guitar related stuff. From what I understand google doesnt rely on the meta tags for ranking the search results. So I guess I'll have to really try to provide alot of content in the page that my be popular search items.

Any tips would be welcome.

Myspace is a good choice for promoting music. They have a special setup for musicians. The pages are really easy to customize. You could, of course, just create your own webpage. Try angelfire or geocities for an easy way to create a webpage. No computer knowledge neccessary. :oP

I like Myspace - qs far as promoting it's all about what you put in. Myspace lets you search members by Zip code - so you could pull up the zip code of the areas you would be likely to be playing and then go to each person and send them an invite, request them as a friend. Then it becomes a numbers game. If you request 1,000 to be your friend, maybe 300-500 will accept. Out of those a smaller percentage would then take the time to come see you play. If you spent hours at it you could successfully build up a pretty big following. That is what I plan to do when I finnish putting this new band together. Give everyone access to the page, give each a few zip codes and then start going member by member to try to build a buzz. I would say you can reach out to more people then the old guirilla marketing strategies and probobly have a slightly higher success rate.

I've just got my own URL. It's so much easier to control and you're not being pestered with a lot of nonsense from "members." (Remember, I'm not computer enamored anyway, so sitting around and playing with "Myspace" isn't something I'd find the least bit appealing.)

How useful is it? Hard to say. I get a few customers from it, but most are word of mouth at this point. If you search for "Colorado Recording Studio" I come up near the top. (A hold-over from when meta tags were worth something!) Even as near the top as I appear, I don't get the kind of hits you'd expect. Over the past 7 years, I've gotten about 8000 hits total on my site. If 1% of them turned into customers, I'd be thrilled, but it's more like .1%

Myspace may do better, but remember that since you're on a site where everyone else is promoting themselves, it's almost like setting up shop in the middle of your competition and hoping you'll be noticed. Add to that, many of us use our computers at work and Myspace and Facebook and YouTube and a multitude of other sites are blocked, so having your own URL is an advantage in that respect. (URL registration and website hosting only costs me about $110/year. So far, about 25% of what I've made from web customers.)

FYI, it';s not for my music, it's for my recording studio.

I already have a website, I guess I should have mentioned that :P I get more or less all of my business through my site and word of mouth, writing jingles and recording voice overs, as well as telephone voice prompts and actual music sometimes. Lots of my work is actually based out of Alberta and some of it from south america... I get around thanks to the web. I'll be getting more business I'm sure when I have my website professionally done...

I think I'll set up a myspace account and fuck around with it. I'll wait until I have it open again though... right now it's not open for musicians because I'm renovating. I'm hoping to get some more done soon... it's so expensive to build :( All the wiring and walls are up... now insulating and drywalling. Then sanding and painting, and then the new hardwood floor.

i like myspace it easy to use and all ya really got to do is spend some time here and there checking out bands and adding them, comenting others is good too. I got people all over the world checking us out. and truthfully we are an opening act at the moment but hey i got 7000 plays with out vocals and leads just rythms and bass and drums. can't wait till i get some good recordings.


But as with all website you do have the occaisional jackass,....