Facebook, Twitter eclipse Myspace in music: experts

They are also providing a major new way to publicize concerts and persuade increasingly youthful fans to buy their music.

While 16- to 24-year-olds prefer to rip and burn CDs without paying for them, 12-to 15-year-olds are the digital natives of today and tomorrow, influential market survey group Forrester's Vice President of Research Mark Mulligan told the music industry's annual MIDEM get-together in Cannes.

Though a mere 15 percent of this young group download peer-to-peer music and just 12 percent buy tracks, 56 percent listen to music on their cell phones and 53 percent watch videos on the Internet.

An increasing number of musicians have tuned in to this shift and are trying a variety of creative approaches to reach out to their fans in order to boost their popularity and their sales of music.

But fans want much more than just information about their favorite bands' upcoming concerts and the release date of a new track or CD, said Jeremy Welt of Warner Bros Records.

Canadian rock band Arcade Fire, for example, used Google maps to give fans an interactive and immersive video experience to help sales of their last album.

Their “Wilderness Downtown” video takes fans back to the street they grew up by allowing them to enter the address on a website, which then sends them a personalized video clip that includes images of their first home.

Grammy-winning singer and instrumentalist Imogen Heap and lead singer for the Chicago-based rock band OK Go Damian Kulash are two examples of how artists are now connecting with their fans in a variety of ways.

Kulash said not being tied to a record label has helped him get in touch directly with his fan base through blogs and Twitter. And this has helped fuel his creativity, Kulash said at MIDEM.

Britain's Heap, who has been “tweeting” on micro blog site Twitter for a number of years, regularly gets her fans involved in helping her write new songs.

Fans also sent in around 1,000 video clips of nature recently to enable Heap make a short film that was projected during her Albert Hall concert in London last year and also viewed by 482,000 people online.

But while social networks play an important role in helping artists build a high profile with fans, it is still not clear whether this really boosts sales of their music.

Heap however revealed here that when she recently traveled to Jakarta in Indonesia to give a concert, thousands turned up at the gig to her great surprise.

How had word had got around the concert? Because of her blogs and tweets, she said.

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