Once you established yourself with a Twitter following, a Facebook Fan page base, are ton of friends on MySpace(yeah I know allot of you do not like

MySpace) and all of the other social networks you probably thought, ok, now I can take a break. Thanks to the team at Facebook the answer is probably

no. Now they came up with something called the Like Button. Yes, Like, as in I like this. It is a rather simple concept and fairly simple to implement.

Here is some information released by the Wall Street Journal:

“The idea is that other Web sites will drive traffic back to Facebook.com, and in turn receive traffic from Facebook. Other sites can also offer personalized

modules, telling individual users what their Facebook friends have done on the site, such as review a restaurant.”

“The new “Like” buttons transmit data about user activity back to Facebook. If they like a band, for example, a link to the band could appear in their

interests. Since advertisers can already target ads to users’ interests, the new buttons could give advertisers more data to target ads to, but Facebook

said it isn’t currently launching any new ad-targeting products in conjunction with the service.”

“For years, he said, the Silicon Valley company has focused on tying together people on the Web, mapping out who knows whom. Now, Facebook wants to

map out connections between people and their interests, gathering more explicit information about users’ favorites in order to deliver them a more

personalized experience on Facebook and on other sites. He called it “the most transformative thing we have ever done for the Web.””

So what does all of this mean to you as a music artist? Do you need to jump on the bandwagon? Well this is your call since in some people’s opinions this

is too early to tell what impact it will have on the music artist. It could be great for the artist since friends of friends will see that they like the same band,

song or singer. They will also be able to see what their friends like and check out the new artists as they are liked by others. It might also be used in the

case where if another band is targeting your fans their band could come up as page suggestion. Is this the new crowdsourcing for the music industry?

Again, it is too early to tell.

Since we are not a single band site, although we have tens of thousands of songs on our site, we decided to go for it. We have already implemented the

like button on all of our music submission opportunities for new music artists and we have also added this on the music artists’ song presentation package

along with implementing it into their comments section. You can take a look here for MIPs and here for music artists. One nice thing is in the comments box you can automatically link your

comments to your Facebook page. Be sure to scroll down to take a look. Now that is a pretty cool feature. You can take a look at some of the ways in

which we have implemented the button to get some ideas on how to make use of it on your website.

Whatever your choice is keep in mind that Facebook is outpacing everyone else so you should pay attention to what they are doing. Understanding how

this new feature will impact your band will be similar in some cases but yet there might be some slight differences depending on the music artist or band.

One of the best things to do is read up and see how others are making use of this feature