Microsoft’s Bing Seach Engine & The Music Industry: How Does Your Band Bing?

No, that's not a typo (for once). I didn't mean bling. I'm referring to Bing, the new Microsoft search engine. It's the computer giant's latest attempt to grab search market share from Google (65%) and Yahoo (21%), and they're backing it with a $100 million marketing campaign.

Why should artists, labels and the music industry care?  Bing searches for and delivers results in a slightly different way than Google and Yahoo; and since the most people look for information about a band, concert or album via their search engine,  how results about you and your projects are delivered matters.  Lower search rankings means less discovery.  It's a simple and important as that.

I'll leave how Bing works (video after the jump) to people far smarter than I am, but a few sample searches of things like White Stripes" and "Roger McGuinn"…

on both Bing and Google delivered somewhat different results.  Bing's reults were mostly a mixture of offical and unoffical pages aboutthe artist (web page, Twitter feed, Wikipedia) and while Google also mixed in reviews and articles that just mentioned the artist.

Controlling what information rises to the top of any search engine is both impossible and counter to the open spirit of the web. But spending just a few minutes looking at the search results that Bing, Google and Yahoo each deliver on projects that matter to you will provide a sharp reminder of the importance of keeping all of your "official" points of contact (web site, social networking pages, etc) up to date, as well as, doing all that you can do to drive traffic to them.  If you don't, the story that the web tells about you could  be dominated by a lousy review or an out of date MySpace page.