I decided to take on a touchy subject and guide an informed discussion about why vinyl isn’t always better than digital. Enjoy.

Facebook is tired of you encouraging your fans to like, comment and share your content. In fact, they’ve figured out that when you encourage them to do these things, it pushes up your comment instead of what they think users will like. Because of this, if you repost spammy links, the same content over and over again or encourage your fans a bit too much, they will punish you and let less of your fans see your updates. As we mentioned before, your fans aren’t seeing many of your updates anyway, so this could be even more detrimental to your fans hearing what you are up to. (via Hypebot)

It’s rare to see the overnight success that Turntable.fm experienced, but sadly it crashed and burned. From the ashes of Turntable, Plug.DJ has risen. Tapping into the social part of music, Plug enables you to host DJ chatrooms with your friends, fans or new friends. You can play each other any song in their system or in your own library. This social experience is an amazing way to bond with fans, while enabling them to discover music in a fresh new way.

Getting On Plug.DJ

If your music is on SoundCloud or YouTube it can be played on Plug.DJ. This also means that in a room, listeners can see videos, so if you have great one it can be seen by the masses.

Existing Rooms

What makes Plug.fm fun is that there are hundreds of users at a time in the popular rooms, which are unlimited in size. At times, DJ spots can open in these rooms giving you a chancea to spin something. You can keep DJing if you avoid getting Mehed, which is when people in the room think what you’re playing sucks. If you drop into the Dubstep room and play your favorite ambient track, you stand a good chance of getting “Mehed”. Be sure to read the Room Info tab before embarking on any massive DJ sets.

If you want to use Plug to get your music discovered, you need to win the crowd over by playing some great established music, earning their respect and then dropping your track. Being too gratuitous with your own tracks can get you “Mehed” pretty fast. But going into rooms that are appropriate for your music and being a part of the community is a great way to get your music heard.

Some hints to Plug.DJ success in existing rooms:

• Rooms - Stick with the room’s description. While music fans can have diverse tastes, if they’re in a room, they’re probably looking for specific content.
• Lead - Listeners want fresh, new and adventurous, not obvious. Playing the most popular song of the genre or a well-known single from a heavy hitter may seem like a good way to win over other users, but remember, these are music nerds. They want fresh new music or hidden gems. Having a deep knowledge of your genre is very helpful. An under-appreciated record you feel is classic will usually go over way better than a worn-out anthem.
• Mix It Up - It can be helpful to play an obscure track and then a crowd pleaser. Playing too many unknown tracks will bore your audience fast.
• Chat – There’s a chat in the room and if you are fun and someone everyone likes the chances of getting “Mehed” are low.

Your Own Room

If you want to bond with fans, you can easily make your own room for them to join. When you create a room on Plug you can make it either public or private. If you make it public anyone, can stumble on it and join. If you want this room to be private for only your fans, it’ll be only available to those who have the URL link to the room. This means you can share it with fans via Twitter or Facebook and use it to bond with fans only.

Once you have this room and some fans in it, you can use it for a variety of things. You can let fans know what you have been listening to while chatting with them to give an inside look at your musical tastes. You can also drop in demos, unreleased tracks or rare tracks if you want to give listeners a treat. While fans can’t easily download these gems, they can still bootleg them and spread them across the Internet. If you’re going to drop unreleased songs you want to keep under lids, don’t give users a warning that you’re about to play something special. Consider giving the song an alias and wait to say what it really is after the song has finished playing.

Other Plug.DJ Ideas

Here are some other ideas for marketing your music on Plug.DJ:

• Make a Fan-Club-Only Room - Premier a track in this private room and make your true fans feel appreciated.
• Event - Plan a scheduled DJ appearance. If you’re going to be recording your album and know you’re done at 9 p.m. every night, tell your fans every Tuesday night you’ll be in this room hanging out.
• Perspective - Get feedback on tracks you’re having problems with by playing them for a select jury. Plug is a great way to get feedback in real time from fans and friends.
• Contests -You can do contests to give fans the chance to DJ in your room. If your room is popular this can be a great chance to gain some fan enthusiasm.
• Popularity - When you make your Plug account, do it via your music’s Twitter handle. You can see a direct correlation in the amount of traffic it drives to twitter, and it’s a great way to increase your followers.

Brian Hazard has up a great article on The Music Think Tank about how you can use TopSpin’s ArtistLink to promote your music. All of the tools are explained and it is a perfect guide to a tool that can really help promote your music.

Couldn’t agree more!

Over a year ago, we learned that Facebook would no longer allow Pages (like your band page or small business) to communicate with all of the people who have clicked on your page. Instead, they would only let you contact 15-20% of the people who liked your page unless you paid money to “promote” your page. Well, it turns out, it gets worse… Valleywag has up an article that Facebook plans on only allowing you to contact 1-2% of the people who have liked your page unless you pay Facebook to talk to them. From Valleywag:

A source professionally familiar with Facebook’s marketing strategy, who requested to remain anonymous, tells Valleywag that the social network is “in the process of” slashing “organic page reach” down to 1 or 2 percent. This would affect “all brands”—meaning an advertising giant likeNike, which has spent a great deal of internet effort collecting over 16 million Facebook likes, would only be able to affect of around a 160,000 of them when it pushes out a post. Companies like Gawker, too, rely on gratis Facebook propagation for a huge amount of their audience. Companies on Facebook will have to pay or be pointless.

That 160,000 still sounds like a lot of people, sure. But how about my favorite restaurant here in New York, Pies ‘n’ Thighs, which has only 3,281 likes—most likely locals who actually care about updates from a nearby restaurant? They would reach only a few dozen customers. A smaller business might only reach one. This also assumes the people “reached” bother to even look at the post.

If you promotion strategy was to build a big following on Facebook, I suggest you reconsider it right now, unless you want to pay them to talk to fans, instead of using more effective means like Twitter and YouTube for free.