The Black Keys Fan Lounge

It’s nothing new to read about the diminishing influence of record companies/labels, the historic core distribution source of music and news about a band, in the last 10 years. It’s often been discussed how bands can take advantage of this media fragmentation, but how can fans of bands better take advantage of the increase in multiple information sources?

There are now more sources, not necessarily better sources. The fragmentation now means many sources often have parts of a story rather than one source being accepted as having told the full story.

Before the rise of social media and its influence on music distribution, hype, and information flows, a music fan would wait for a hard copy magazine interview or their local radio DJ (if the band’s music was even played regularly or at all) to inform them of news about their favourite band. A fan would usually only see the band live when they toured through their town. The fan could maybe hope to view the band on a DVD or video release. News or releases were shared by word of mouth and a fan had to actively seek out new information.

Times have definitely changed.

If the numbers are anything to go by, most fans are happy to have their news delivered to them via Facebook. You don’t need to do anything except click a ‘like’ button and band updates are delivered to you. The News Feed on Facebook is an effective aggregator of news/updates from friends and pages you like. For the active fan, however, there are many more ways to stay in touch with and seek out many differing views and sources of information about the band.

The Black Keys Fan Lounge aims to share multiple views of the band – not just to regurgitate or re-publish news from The Black Keys own website, MySpace, Twitter or Facebook sites. Those sites do a good job doing what they aim to do – creating a controlled, regular flow of inflormation by representing a particular persona, attitude, and in time understanding of the band. There’s nothing wrong with that nor is there any suggestion that it is not a true account of the band.

What those “official” sites don’t speak of is a fan-based point of view. They don’t report on the nuggets the record label, the band, management, the PR company and other interested parties don’t think are important or would rather not promote further. They simply don’t have time to re-publish and hold up points of interest for further discussion to audiences.

The mechanics of writing a blog post is easy, having something relevant, original, or well researched is not necessarily as easy. While many fans might consider what follows in this post to be a very basic lesson in Social Media Agreggation 101, the point is to hopefully get more fans using these available techniques to bring more happenings about The Black Keys to light. Those fans can then either use the info for their own use, or they could choose to share their information with other fans by posting it to a fan forum, tweeting it or by writing a blog post themselves.

The common denominator of these tools and techniques is that they save you time looking. What’s published on the internet comes to you rather than you having to go out and constantly look for it.

What other techniques or tools do you use to keep track of The Black Keys?

Some common social media sites/techniques/tools to help the modern fan:

Facebook

• ‘Like’ The Black Keys official page to receive updates into your News Feed
• ‘Like’ other fan pages following The Black Keys
• ‘Like’ other artists you know are associated with The Black Keys – anything from those supporting, engineers, promotors etc. You never know when of them will discuss the band. It’s important to add these ‘likes’ to content into your News Feed because Google cannot index the content within the closed Facebook network and therefore Google Alerts will note pick up mentions

Twitter

• Use a Twitter client like Tweetdeck to conduct Searches and Follow multiple subjects and conversations. You can search conversations via the common hash tags ie #theblackkeys or by keyword “the black keys”
• Group magazines or people you know are likely to perhaps have contact with the band within your Twitter client. It’s easier to sift through and find the nuggets from likely sources this way
• People make random observations or reveal scoops without knowing it. You can always reply to them and ask an additional question
• Fans love posting pictures via Twitter so you can get a good sense of an event through the real time images posted.

Youtube

• Subscribe via the YouTube interface to people who have posted good Black Keys video content previously. You can then stay updated to their new uploads.
• There’s a good program called www.video-alerts.com that scours the net for new videos tagged with, say, “the black keys” or any subject you are after. You’ll get a daily email with video links to videos meeting your search criteria

Google Alerts

• One of the easiest things any fan can do to find out what people are saying about The Black Keys anywhere at anytime is to set up a Google Alert. The alert basically is defined by a search parameter you set. For example, you set up an alert for Google to search for content where the keywords “the black keys” appear. You will then be alerted by an email or you can subscribe to an rss feed of this content for viewing in your ‘reader’.
• The Black Keys have been in recent times been one of the most blogged about bands leading up to and post the release of the ‘Brothers’ album. You can search for blog posts only or related topics ie Muscle Shoals Sound Studio to help broaden your interest in a band. You can find alot of content very easily, there’s probably no way you’d be able to find out about other fans views without this tool

RSS feeds

• RSS (Real Simple Syndication) allows a feed of the latest blog posts added to a website to be collated in a reader. Google Reader and Feedburner are popular readers. You simply click on the common rss icon on most blogs and subscribe to the feed. Sites that have content you like is then all ordered within the reader. You don’t need to go looking to see if a site has published anything new.
• You can rss feed more than just blog posts. Forum posts, twitter feeds are other common options.
• The best thing about rss feeds is that you can literally follow as many websites/blog as you are interested in. You can then page through the content very quickly within your reader – it saves you so much time.

MySpace

• Most bands now simply update Facebook since MySpace is less influential. MySpace seems to dominate in terms of best presenting new tour dates, however, in one place.
• Alike Facebook, MySpace content is in a closed system so can’t be indexed by Google, therefore you need to have access to activity streams of artists/bands to pick up their posts that might reference The Black Keys
• Bands also often release rarities, stream their album before release dates or present alternate song versions via their MySpace mp3 player

Forums

• Rss feeding is an easy way to see what’s been posted on a forum that discusses your band. Or you could rss feed a topic in a forum you have commented on to see who else replies to a point you’ve made or a question you’ve posed
• Follow other music related forums especially those interested in music recording techniques. The quality of those posting is usually really high on these type of forums and borders on the music-geeky which is great because you have a much better chance of getting true musical insights directly from those that often helped make the music
• Better than reading is contributing to forums. Asking questions increases your knowledge and prompts you to seek out other links to more content. Forums invariably have a much richer flow of content, though it may take much reading to find the true nuggets.
• Many forums require you to sign up (free) in order to access the content and discussions. They are the perfect place to find other engaged active seekers of information about the band you like.

Photos

• Photo sharing websites like Flickr are easy to search for images about your favourite band. Bands don’t annouce they are using a new guitar prior to the show but it’s easy to pick up changes in style or sound by regularly scanning images for changes in equipment

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Keep in touch with The Black Keys Fan Lounge:

• @blackkeysfans – Twitter
• The Black Keys Fan Lounge- MySpace
• Connect with other fans on this site’s Forum
• The Black Keys Fan Lounge – Facebook

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