With around 50 million active users, Facebook is the seventh most popular website on the Internet right behind MySpace. This also means that Facebook can be an invaluable promotion platform for bands and musicians. On tuesday 6th of November Facebook announced Facebook Pages, which they describe as “distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook”. In other words they finally allow bands and musicians to create special profiles with a built-in music player in the style of MySpace.

The new standard applications for musicians include a music player, discussion board and discography. Other already familiar standard applications allow you to add photos, videos, tour dates (or other events) and basic information on your page. Also, friends are now regarded as fans. The new features aren’t groundbreaking, but as with MySpace the real value is in the community and the massive amount of active users. However, Facebook is still missing a special community for artists where all the artist profiles are somehow categorized. This makes it harder for people to search for new music on Facebook. Hopefully there is some kind of directory under development.

Facebook also announced Social Ads, which allow you to “promote your website or Facebook Page with highly-targeted advertising”. The advertising campaigns start from $5 per day and you can define quite specifically your target group. Since the starting cost is so low even usigned artists could afford to promote for example upcoming concerts or new songs. If you aren’t into paid promotion there are some useful extra applications such as iCast (by iLike), which allows you to send bulletins across many social networks simultaneously. I’m pretty sure that in the future Facebook will be an essential marketing and promotion platform for any artist.