Hootsuite.com has made it easy to manage your social networks and keep your sanity doing it. The site offers more than just a website link shortener for users to utilize.

The Twitter focused site lets you add and update your social networks including Facebook, WordPress, LinkedIn, Myspace and Ping.fm.

This site has recently streamlined its interface to make it easier to use. You can now customize your streams, tabs and columns on the dashboard.

Attention indie  bands and artists, Headliner.fm wants to help you connect with other musicians and ultimately reach new fans and better promote your music. The website is a “promotion exchange” for bands and artists to help build awareness for each other.

Bands who sign-up on Headliner are able to join forces with and promote other bands on each other’s Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace profiles. Members are rewarded a number of “band bucks” (proportionate to how many followers they have on their social media sites) which can be used to buy requests from other bands to give your band promotion on their social media profiles.

At TheBuzz, we’re dedicated to bringing you all the greatest how-tos and success stories from the indie underground, and this time, we’ve got something really special to share.

When it comes to building hype and a fanbase, indie artists have thought of everything. The independent artists’ movement has even grown to the point where musicians are rejecting major label deals in favor of independent careers. Of course, there might not be a lot of money in indie music, but what we do have is shitloads of artistic integrity.

Enter We’re No Fakers

We’re No Fakers is an indie band with a plan so revolutionary, so radical, that not only has it never before been attempted, it’s bound to transform the nature of the words “artistic integrity” forever. I caught up with the Fakers lead Singer, Julia Fullia, in her parents’ basement earlier this week to get the scoop.

When I enter the house, Julia is on the couch, waiting both for her nails to dry and for the airplane glue in her fauxhawk to set. Already, I can sense that I am in the presence of a consummate professional.

GH: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Julia. I know you were a bit reluctant to participate.

JF: Yeah. Interviews aren’t really my thing.

GH: And that’s something of a core principle for We’re No Fakers, isn’t it?

JF: Sorta? I guess? We haven’t really talked about it.

Name: RootMusic

Quick Pitch: RootMusic is all about making musicians’ professional lives better, be it through building software or building community.

Genius Idea: RootMusic’s debut product is called BandPage, and it makes MySpace-like band page features possible inside a Facebook fan page.

At present, Facebook fan pages are laid out in such a way that you can’t share your music with your fans while letting them continue to browse for information. You can deploy a music player tab, but as soon as your fans click on the Photos tab to see pictures of your band, the music stops.

Myspace continues to streamline their Web site to try and keep up with features on other social networks. The latest update is the “Share” function that now allows you to apply a link and video to your status updates.

Instead of having to choose a “Mood” to update your status, Myspace has updated their design to match the rest of the profile’s home page; while adding the options to apply a photo, link, video and mood to your status.

This is just the latest in updates and moves by Myspace to stay afloat in social media. The site recently updated the “Stream” of your status posts and bulletins in an attempt to organize their many features.

Every Indie music artist should think about starting a blog.

First though, a little rant. I’m always shocked by the amount of crudeness people will allow on their MySpace pages. It’s not always their own content either. In fact, usually it’s the comments other people leave on their page.

If people start dropping comments on your page like, “Yo man, ur shits smashin, check out my dope new tracks !!”, not only should you not check out their dope new tracks, but disable comments on your page altogether because your page is becoming a spam farm. If your page is attracting these types of numnuts, pretty soon you’ll be inundated with more garbage than a Mumbai slum.

You might have gotten a passing grade for producing a good single, but how do you grade in your digital music promotions?

It’s no longer the wave of the music industry- it’s practically the only way to succeed in today’s music industry. Yes, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and etc is all the rave, and you need to join the bandwagon or not even bother at all, but it’s far more than having a social profile. Digital music promotions is all about SEO (search engine optimization) and cross promoting across various online outlets. It’s about blogging and being blogged about. It’s about P2P networks and online music stores. There’s so much to digital promotions, and if you think it’s one-dimensional and all about Myspace & Facebook, then you’re in for a rude awakening.

Here’s a few factors to grade your digital music promotions strategy:

I travel a lot to speak at music conferences and I see this all of the time: Musicians squirming in their seats as I present ideas on how to improve their marketing. The idea of having to do one more thing is just unbearable to them, and they literally begin to melt down in front of me.

One of my best friends is an artist – a dancer – and she literally takes to bed after she has to write a press release; it literally makes her sick.

You will NEVER achieve the success you want it if you try to do it all alone and take on things that stop you dead in your tracks!

I can not stress this enough: You MUST learn to delegate, and get the stuff that makes you completely stressed out off of your plate.

Teen sensation rockers Disco Curtis’ debut video for “Ashley” is currently premiering on MySpace.com right now here. In just 8 hours the band has almost 5,000 plays!

I read an article on Billboard.com [awhile] ago which said that Coldplay is going to give away their live CD “leftrightleftrightleft” to all fans attending its Viva La Vida summer tour. Brilliant!

“Playing live is what we love,” says Coldplay. Exactly! It should be. Surely, a day doesn’t go by where you don’t hear about how you should be giving away free music, right? You should be. As I’ve mentioned before, music as a product doesn’t have much value anymore because it’s too common. It’s basic supply and demand.

Ok, so now, instead of hoping in earnest that somebody buys your tracks, you should be hoping that as many of them as possible download them for free. But does that mean you’ll make a penny off of your free downloads down the road? Well, it depends. Coldplay does. And they’re making lots of it. So why can’t you?

In continuing with my exploration into the broad question of how the Internet has changed the playing field for musicians, I turned to my old friend Howie Kleinberg Senior VP of ElectricArtists.

Although ElectricArtists started out exclusively as a music marketing firm, their deep knowledge of the culture of the Internet allowed them to handle all types of campaigns, from films and TV to books, DVDs and magazines. Their main specialty is building communities on the Internet.

Q: How has the Internet shifted the playing field for musicians?

Overwhelmed with maintaining your MySpace page, blog, podcast, e-mail, website, tour updates and everything else online to promote yourself?

Twitter is an ingenious solution that will give your fans more of you and it takes less than 3 minutes a day to stay on top of everything without your computer!

I’m just back from summer vacation where I spent a relaxing 11 days in the gorgeous Pacific Northwest right after having attended Gnomedex07. At Gnomedex, I learned A LOT about Web 2.0, social networking and blogging and my next several editions of Sound Advice will focus on things I learned.

Or could something even more sinister be going on…

Imeem users got an unpleasant surprise last week when they clicked on their favorite music site and found themselves redirected to MySpace. Seemingly overnight, the imeem API had been completely absorbed into MySpace Music. The social networking dinosaur bought the once-promising imeem platform for less than $1 million.

The Breaks

The first disappointment comes when you realize that MySpace has not transferred your imeem playlists over to their site. The redirect page contains a vague promise that they are “working to migrate your imeem playlist to MySpace Music. We’ll email you about that once we have more details.” Yeah. You do that, MySpace. You email me.