Facebook 'Timeline', Hurting Band Pages?

Helen Bach|April 13, 2012

A dramatic drop in visitor hits to band Facebook pages is occurring. According to Digital Music "We saw marked declines heading into Facebook's official switch to Timeline. But it now looks like Timeline is eviscerating the Facebook artist app, or at best forcing it into some lowly plateau."

Lets face it you would be hard pressed to find anyone who is a fan of the new Timeline format but I cant recall a FB change that didn't cause a ruckus amongst the masses. People don't like change and well Timeline is the biggest change yet. I am not a fan of it as I 'like' bands and often find its not worth the effort to sort out where their tour dates, songs, data is. On the traditional format it was all right there along the left side. But the FB powers that be make changes for a reason so roll with it or get out.

But if you are a band without a Facebook page, you're in the dark ages. You simply must have one- I wont got to myspace, its creepy over there. Are we now on to Tumblr, Twitter and Pinterest? Where will band park their info now and more importantly how will we find it? Check out these depressing statistics from the two major DIY app sites
BandPage (formerly RootMusic)
Daily Average User Totals:
Peak: 1,700,000
March 25th: 640,000
April 10th: 210,000
Drop = 87.6%

ReverbNation (Band Profile)
Daily Average UserTotals:
Peak: 724,000
March 25th: 389,000
April 10th: 220,000
Drop = 69.6%

More than a 50% drop on both sites.. that's insane. If I were a band I would be greatly concerned. Where is everyone going and how are they getting there? More importantly what other tweaks will cause more drop (or increase) and how can bands control it? Social media has made allot of stars but what it gives it can take away.

Of course, now that Facebook owns Instagram its just a matter of time til we have to see the dinner plates of every band we ever loved. Then again we don't have to look if we don't want to.

While you're at it.. you can "Like", Rock Never Sleeps, that's our Facebook page. Alyson Camus, Iman Lababedi and Yours truly all have pages as well- be our friends if ya wanna.