The Johnsons Big Band had a page on MySpace.com, but the local group's main writer/keyboardist Chris Cannon didn't think much of it. This was late 2004 and MySpace was still young enough to be dismissed as just another Friendster.

But by the time he was putting a page up on his new band, Skinks, in November, the social networking site had emerged as a now-indispensable part of any band's marketing strategy, offering easy access to a worldwide membership quickly approaching the 49 million mark.

In two years on the Web.

And that number is growing at 4 million members a month.

"It makes a smaller microcosm of the Internet," said Mr. Cannon, of Swissvale, "which is kind of interesting for bands and networking because, instead of looking at this massive Internet full of bands, where maybe you read about a band and you're just going to Google it up and maybe find its Web site, well, at MySpace, it puts all these bands into a subnet of the Internet and really seems to generate traffic because of that."

The way it works is, you put up a personal Web page on the MySpace network, where viewers can check out your music, see what you look like, find out when and where you're playing, read your blogs, send messages and maybe even join your list of friends. That last part is the key because it allows you to send out promotional "bulletins" or invitations to your friend list when you need to get the word out on a show or new recording.

And it's free.

Greg Joseph, of the Clarks, was reminiscing recently about the way they used to get the word out about their shows.

"We'd all sit around the living room and do quarterly fliers," he said. "And toward the end, we were doing close to 10,000 mailers, where you had to get the labels printed, someone had to have a stamping machine, the whole nine yards. Now you can just get on there and send to your whole list in five minutes. Do what literally used to take three days of time."

Of course, people in bands have been sending out e-mail and posting new music and upcoming show dates on their Web sites for years, but compared with maintaining a Web site, MySpace is ridiculously easy.

As Matt Hanzes, of Black Tie Revue, said, "It's a lot easier to update that than trying to get ahold of your Web master. Updating a MySpace page takes no talent at all. A lot of bands, they don't even have actual Web sites. They just have a MySpace account that acts as their Web site."

It's also more likely that someone will stumble across your band on MySpace. People in bands do their best to get added as friends to the pages of similar artists, hoping that when members visit, say, the Shins page and notice a picture of Skinks as one of the 22,300-some friends on the Shins' page, the hope is, they'll click on the picture, linking to Skinks' own page, where they can check out the music and, if all goes well, become a friend.

Or what a friend amounts to in the MySpace universe.

Because one goal on MySpace is to have a lot of friends, not all an artist's friends are necessarily fans.

The Science Fiction Idols have had a page on MySpace for about a year, and, in that time, they've made more than 1,100 friends. But as guitarist Gary Strutt said, "You can add AC/DC or any number of strippers from Los Angeles, which, I don't think they'll be coming to any Sci-Fi Idols shows any time soon. When we originally set this up, the one guy in the band, he didn't take it real seriously, and he figured, well, let's just get a bunch of cute girls on our page and there you go. So it was kind of a silly thing and then, we're like, 'You know what? This is actually a good tool. Let's take it seriously.' "

They've even traded shows with bands from other cities through their MySpace page.

As Mr. Hanzes says, "I think you could exist without it."

But there's not much point in that.

Even Beck and Madonna used MySpace to generate buzz on their new albums. There's a MySpace label now distributed through Interscope. And bands are getting signed after being discovered on the network. So a band just starting out has everything to gain.

Take Skinks, a band so new it doesn't have a record out. When Skinks played New York City, Mr. Cannon said, "It was funny because there were a lot of people at the show, and they're all asking me why we didn't play songs that were on our MySpace page. And that was surprising, but it really did show that people did visit that MySpace account and listen to those songs."

First Published: January 15, 2006, 5:00 a.m.