BandPage's Facebook app to make MySpace obsolete

With 500,000 artists on board, BandPages makes it easier to share on Facebook Open Graph

As MySpace has rebranded its site to cater to indie bands, one Facebook extension has amassed 500,000 musician pages. BandPage has taken the new Facebook API to create an easy way to share and discuss music on the social networking site where more than 840 million people are already communicating. 

On Monday, BandPage announced that in the last six month, the company has doubled the number of musicians sharing their information on its third-party Facebook app and will let listeners easily share content with friends through the Timeline history ticker.

Using the Facebook Open Graph API to post users' listening history to the ticker helped Spotify experience extreme growth in brand awareness, members and membership upgrades. BandPage is now looking to use the infrastructure already built into the Facebook Open Graph to grow its user base and the monetization of its artist indexing services.

This latest update comes after BandPages simplified its own brand by dropping the RootMusic title from its original company name: “RootMusic BandPage.”

BandPage has raised a total of $18.3 million to pay for the engineering costs of scaling, as well as marketing and product development.

While creating an artist page to share music and band information is free, the company also has an affordable upgrade fee of $2 per month for the premium membership.

BandPage is also taking the tech Spring Break known as SXSW as a time to raise brand awareness by putting on concerts for 10 straight days.

Currently, 27.9 million music fans interact with BandPage each month, and 870,000 are looking at musician pages per day according to AppData. 

At this rate, BandPages could prove that it isn't necessary to power a sperate social network for musicians, as MySpace is trying to accomplish. 

The update has also made musician pages more visually stimulating by upping the size of the page banners size to 810px by 360px -- like the Facebook Timeline cover picture but more substantial, and great for advertising new videos, album releases and tour dates.

People following particular bands or artists will also be able more more clearly like, favorite and declare intent to go to shows with one click.

Some of the fun new offerings include the ability  to mark a music show as: “I Want To Go” or “I’m Going” and then the update is added to your Timeline.

More third-party apps could take a page from this integration to help with marketing and revenue based off the Facebook Open Graph API.