When you make and share music you are creating a community. It may be a big audience at a show, or a small group of friends blasting your tunes in the high school parking lot. In collecting an audience you are often bringing together people who have more in common then just an appreciation for your art, like the way they dress or the other music they listen to.

The promise behind Social Networking on the web is that it allows people to parallel   what goes on in “Meatspace” in virtual form. Ning.com is a site that helps your fans    connect with each other and keep up with your artistic endeavors.

Overview

Ning makes it super simple to create and customize a brand new social network. It allows you to go beyond the simple profile that the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world allow. Your fans can even create groups within your network that are based around, for example, where they live or who their favorite band member is. A certain rapper famously used it as a tool to keep in touch with his audience and also make some extra pennies (Free Social Media Tools Unite 50 Cent Fans).

Once it’s up and running, and you have your fan base using it, you can do things like: blast out notes to everyone on the network, keep a calendar of your upcoming shows, write blogs, and upload pictures and video. Many of the features of Ning overlap with what you’re doing on other sites. This is fine because you can just pull in feeds through RSS or widgets (they have an easy way to integrate with Flickr too) and still only update content in one place.

Costs

Singing up is free and for most musicians the basics are good enough. You’ll have to put up with a not-so-easy to remember URL (your-bands-name.ning.com), some ads on the side of the page, and extra ning promotional links. For a various monthly fees you can change any of those things and clean up your network to focus on you. You can also get more storage and bandwidth if needed but you’d have to have a REALLY active networkto need it.

One thing to consider — once you have a good amount of traffic — is signing up to “Control the Ads”. It’s $20 a month but will allow you to run your own ads (e.g. Google AdSense) and potentially make money. How cool would that be?

Final Thoughts

The focus on having your own social network is getting your fans to interact with each other in the context of your music. Ning accomplishes this to an extent and hopefully will continue to provide features to bring the site beyond being a glorified profile on another social network. Right now there isn’t a whole lot for your fans to do past posting to forums, creating groups, and checking out other fans. Allowing users to share their own pics of your shows or blog about your music without having to use the forums would be nice.

Regardless, it is an easy way to make a website for your music with a lot of functionality and the social aspect can just be a bonus — or if it really catches on a great way to really expand your audience.

Check out BrokeDownVan’s social network at brokedownvan.ning.com It took about 10 minutes to set up, which you can tell by the ugliness of it.

Also check out our blog on setting up a social network with Ning.com.