Music Ally

Fall Out Boy star Pete Wentz took to the stage at MidemNet this afternoon to talk about his use of social media, in a joint session with Ning CEO Gina Bianchini.

“We were using blogs from the beginning, but as more technologies came out and we had more fans, we wanted to find a way to have a more intimate relationship with them. But it’s hard to do,” he said.

“The truth is, in our age as globalised as we are, you do need to interact with your fans. They expect that of you.”

Fall Out Boy use Ning, which lets bands and anyone else create their own social networks, and then make money from them. However, money shouldn’t be the driving force on the part of the artist.

Or, as Wentz put it, “People are not really interested in just being pointed to iTunes” – talking about artists using sites like Twitter (or worse, their marketing people using sites like Twitter) to pimp their wares to fans constantly.

Bianchini agreed, saying it’s vital for bands to be “authentic”, and that fans “smell it a mile away” if they’re not.

Even so, Ning is clearly making decent money for some of the artists using it, such as 50 Cent. Bianchini talked about the ‘hub and spoke’ strategy, where bands drive traffic from their MySpace profiles, Twitter feeds and other online presences to their Ning network.

But the quote of the session came from Wentz: “It’s a good time to be in music, and a horrible time to be in music. A lot of things can go wrong, but it’s like the Wild West – as long as you’ve got a pistol and you’re ready to shoot somebody, you’re going to be okay!”

Indeed.

For a rull report of the Pete Wentz and Gina Bianchini interview, read our liveblog on the Midem(Net) Blog.

Tags: fallout boy, ning, pete wentz

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 3:00 am and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.