BandPage breaks out of Facebook

It’s become fashionable to break free from Facebook.

BandPage, whose Facebook application has been adopted by half a million bands and musicians, on Tuesday announced it is launching beyond Facebook and onto the broader Web.

The San Francisco start-up is giving bands a way to market themselves outside of Facebook with a suite of free, dead-simple digital publishing tools. Using BandPage’s new application, artists can update photos, videos, tour dates, band member bios and song lists. Any change that’s made once through the application is automatically updated not just on the band’s Facebook page, but also on their websites and blogs.

Don’t have a website for your band? The company is also launching an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop tool that any 6-year-old can use to create a custom site.

BandPage, formerly known as RootMusic, was once routinely ranked among Facebook’s top 5 applications. It remains the top music application for bands on the social network, adopted by more than 500,000 artists.

But Facebook recently changed its policy for how band pages pop up on the pages of its 900 million active users. That tweak plunged BandPage and other third-party marketing applications such as Sprout and Wildfire into oblivion -- at least on Facebook.

While Facebook still has a formidable funnel of users that companies find valuable, it’s also made them wary of the power of Facebook to unilaterally change their fortunes overnight.

It’s no wonder that companies like BandPage and Zynga have looked for ways to become less beholden to Facebook by expanding their horizons on the Web.

In Zynga’s case, the San Francisco social gaming juggernaut last year launched Zynga.com, a website separate from Facebook that features many of the company’s top games. Zynga has also invested heavily in mobile games on non-Facebook platforms such as Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

BandPage, founded two years ago by its 27-year-old chief executive J Sider, is not ungrateful to Facebook. But Sider’s customers, believing that Facebook is not the be-all end-all, have been clamoring for a way to expand their reach on the Web for a broader audience.

“Bands have asked us to create a way for them to take their Facebook page with them,” Sider said. “This allows them to do that while creating the best experience for musicians to set up their online presence”

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