Ryan MacMillan

As we continue our exploration of the Social Media Footprint, I came across something that the “Music 2.0″ company ReverbNation has come up with that defines something similar for musicians.

They’ve come up with a platform that gives a Band Equity score to a band based on the success of their online outreach. They’ve done this by looking at Breadth (how widespread is a band’s content online), Influence (how much of an impact are they making on their fans), Recency (how often is new content available), and Access (how easy is it for a fan to access and share a band’s content/message).

They look at everything from MySpace stats to number of song plays and site visits to come up with a tangible Band Equity score which can be compared to other artists and monitored over time.

I really love that they’re taking the initiative on this for music, since there’s so much out there for artists to take advantage of (MySpace Music, Facebook Music, iMeem, Last.fm…) and it’s hard to tell if you’re really making any sort of real connection with your fans — which for musicians, is pretty darn important.

ReverbNation does bring up a good point, though, that you can’t account for a band’s success just by the numbers. I’d like to see how they could bring in sentiment to the mix, too, and how it correlates to album sales/downloads. Not to mention, how can this Band Equity correlate to offline connections like live shows? What kind of insights can bands get from this score that will help them build deeper connections and increase sales, and not just, for example, boost the number of MySpace friends?