Virtually all established music artists maintain web sites – or their record company does it for them. Some use them as a personal connection for fans, by providing periodic blog entries. It’s a tool to sell a few CDs from past years, announce show dates and provide some connection for the fans. There are also hardcore fan sites, especially for veteran bands like the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith, who have assembled twenty five or thirty years worth of fans. True also for musicians who have been gone for a long time; you can find many sites for Elvis and others for ground breaking rockers like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly.
Many of the newer acts maintain web sites, but virtually all of the emerging musicians who are aggressive use multiple resources on the web. The biggest online phenomenon in the music business has been the emergence of MySpace and, to a lesser extent, other social networking sites such as Pandora and Pure Volume. For some bands, MySpace has supplanted the need for a personal website.
By the end of 2005 more than 600,000 bands were using MySpace to upload songs and videos, announce shows, promote albums and interact with fans. The reason? There are 50 million potential fans on MySpace, and many of them use the site to search for new music as well as established acts. MySpace has acted on the remarkable marriage of music, listeners and their web site by starting a record label.