CMT Blog: Facebook

If you follow Billy Ray Cyrus on Twitter, you know he's up to something because lately he has been all about the mayo. Saying things like "In town for Hellmann's sandwich Swap n Share supporting Feeding America" and "Just got room service. Can't go wrong with chicken fingers and Hellmann's mayo!!!! Sweetnibblets ... I'm stuffin my face!!!!" His last Tweet was about facebook.com/hellmanns, and now I finally have it all figured out. Cyrus has teamed up with Facebook, Hellmann's, Feeding America and eBay. Here's how it works: go on Facebook and have them make you a virtual sandwich. (Mine was Hellmann's, avocado and corned beef on sourdough.) Then Hellmann's will donate seven lunches to Feeding America, the domestic hunger-relief charity. Even better, if you bid on the eBay auction part of this deal, you can win the chance to swap a real sandwich with the real Cyrus backstage just before his concert in Niceville, Fla.

That sounds kind of dirty, doesn't it? It's totally not. All it means is that tonight (July 21) at 7:25 p.m. ET, I will be in front of my computer watching Brad Paisley give a live performance at the White House. How cool is that?

I have been slowly but surely learning my way around the Internet. And I can handle all the basics, like downloads and uploads and even the occasional Web cam chat. But I'm kind of a live stream virgin. That has to change, though. More and more artists are doing things like this because they want to give their fans multiple ways to hear (and in this case, see) their music.

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Everybody's doing it. So even if an artist isn't all that into it, social networking sites are now a part of their marketing arsenal. Like it or not. The Tennessean reports that country artists are jumping on the virtual bandwagon left and right. With the country fan demographic -- and the artists themselves -- getting younger and more Web-addicted, Lady Antebellum's Dave Haywood makes a good point: "We like to think it increases interest in what we're doing, but it's also the way we've grown up. We're in our mid-20s, and from high school on, for us it was being on the Internet and chatting." And even though Taylor Swift, Jack Ingram, Lady Antebellum and Keith Anderson all use the Net in different ways, the important thing is that they are using it. Some aren't, though, and that's OK, too. Like Alan Jackson told the newspaper, "I share a lot in my music, and I think that's plenty."

Want that coveted T-shirt from Kenny Chesney's rescheduled show in Dallas? You know, the black one that says "There's Something Sexy About the Rain, Lightning and a Dallas, Texas Make-Up Show." Even if you weren't there, now you can pretend you were. The merchandise people at Richards & Southern have set up a Facebook page to make it even tougher to resist the country souvenirs we all love. Like Jamey Johnson, Gretchen Wilson and Sugarland T-shirts, Conway Twitty cookbooks, Julianne Hough pink sling bags and Kellie Pickler necklaces. And those are just the items on the first page. So now, in between thinking up witty status updates and untagging yourself in pictures, you can do a little virtual shopping.

Those are his words, not mine. In this seriously funny interview with EW.com, Brad Paisley admits he doesn't know much about Facebook. "I need to learn more about it, especially if I'm gonna sing about it. Here I am, making all these claims in a song, and I guess I'm a fraud," he said. But the interview's not all about his lack of tech savvy. It's more about his new album and how it would feel wrong to be singing meaningless songs right now. Plus, he says, "I just had so much I wanted to say." Like about his lust for water, longing for the melting pot that is America and looking at the future through all different perspectives. It's cool. The interview and the album.

This is exhausting, really. Keeping up with all the ways a country singer can put himself out there online. And then you add a few imposters to that mix, and it's a full-time job just weeding out the fakes and phonies from the real thing.

Take Tim McGraw. He has roughly 395,000 friends on MySpace, about 94,000 fans on Facebook and some 7,042 followers on Twitter. Those, I think, are really him. Mostly because I believe the Twitter feed when it says, "This is the official Tim McGraw Twitter feed that is being set up for Tim. Please don't be fooled by cheap imitations! :) Stay tuned."

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It was only a matter of time before Facebook jumped on the music bandwagon. And now the hotshots who founded it are in talks with digital music sites to "deeply integrate their music experience into Facebook." Whatever that means. I am kind of a Facebook rookie, so I don't know everything there is to know about social-networking sites. But it makes a lot of sense. I like the "friends" I have on Facebook, so it stands to reason that I would like their music recommendations, as well. It narrows down the playing field a little. Facebook tried to let users upload music once before, but record labels complained. So let's hope this time they dot their virtual I's and cross their virtual T's before they go live.