We’re running a project on unsigned bands. These tend not to hang out in online research panels and so we’ve been looking elsewhere for them. An obvious place to find them of course is social networks and so we’re going to experiment by contacting a few unsigned bands directly on their MySpace pages.
We’re really not sure what response rate we’ll get (if any).
The survey is quite interesting for an unsigned band - it’s about how they market themselves and how they can hit the big time - and we will incentivise it as well (though perhaps we could trial an unincentivised version as well to see if it makes a difference)..
Am a bit concerned about the ethics - I presume bands will be happy to get noticed, but I am concerned if they would consider this survey invitation as an intrusive request.
We’re also working with a partner site, dedicated to unsigned bands (there are a lot around!). That will allow us to cover UK and US, but will of course be a biased sample, coming from a single source (hence my interest in generating more interviews by approaching bands directly).
Experiment: Contact 100 bands on MySpace with a 10 minute (relatively interesting, very topical) survey.
Results: Will report back
Conclusions: Will report back