As Joe Summers rolls out of bed in the morning and gets online he, like many people, has a routine: Check e-mail, then Facebook, then Twitter, then perhaps a blog.

For some, this still includes MySpace. Usually, this has little benefit outside of their social life — for Summers, it’s business.

As the lead singer of his Ames-area band, Classic in the Making, working to maintain its presence on social networking sites is vital to its success. Though the spots where they make themselves heard has changed over the past year.

“Now there are so many bands on MySpace, it’s hard to find bands you like,” Summers said. “I’m really starting to get into blogs and letting them find me bands.”

Summers recalled checking into Web sites like PureVolume and MySpace to keep up with music in high school. As he’s been in bands through college, his bands have placed themselves on MySpace immediately.

Summers said it’s as if “having great music isn’t enough anymore.” Bands today must operate more like small businesses and be able to handle appearance, merchandising, logos as well as selling their music and booking the shows all on their own.

He said Myspace, in the past, was a great way to be heard and build a following, yet he believes now “actual social networking” holds more importance.

“When we played with Mayday Parade there was this band called A Bird A Sparrow that was just following the tour and making people listen to their music while they waited in line,” Summers said.

“I see a resurgence of the concert experience,” singer-songwriter Andy Zipf said. “Better live acts and less auto-tuned smoke and mirrors. People are tired of being fed that shrill.”

Zipf is based in Virginia but tours all over the U.S. including central Iowa. Zipf holds a strong importance in the integrity of his relationship with his fans or “pfriends” as he refers to them.

While MySpace gave rise to countless acts, even creating stars on MySpace Records which essentially shut down earlier this month, the site saw drastic decreases in traffic as Facebook and Twitter have continued to grow over the past six months. MySpace has attempted to compete by adding videos, a full catalog music streaming service, news feeds and trending reports for bands on their fans.

In 2009, MySpace shifted its focus, announcing they would begin to emphasize video and MySpace TV competing more with Yahoo! rather than Facebook. It’s been expected that Facebook and MySpace will finally allow users to link statuses on the sites at some point in 2010; potentially starting with a new service MySpace is starting called “Fan Video.”

This is how Kayla Kern, junior in design and advertising, believes MySpace will stay relevant.

“I mean with Twitter you can link to Tumblr, MySpace, Facebook,” Kern said.

But she acknowledged this makes Twitter more of a hub for information. Kern pointed out that being able to do much of these updates through text messaging and the growth of mobile connectivity is also increasingly connecting bands and fans.

Kern has used MySpace to develop her own photography business that primarily dealt with taking pictures of bands both live and promotionally. MySpace has been key to her networking with other photographers and getting her work out — attracting more bands to hire her.

“If your page looks good, more people are going to check it out,” Kern said of bands’ MySpace pages. “That brings in graphic designers, photographers.”

“Bands always said at shows to check them out on MySpace and everyone laughed, but it worked,” she added.

Kern said Flickr has been a great tool for networking with other photographers. She still uses MySpace but admits it’s nowhere near the point it used to be.

There’s no doubt MySpace’s influence and size of audience further brought down walls for many musicians, destroying the formula for success in music. Bands suddenly had the potential to gain the national and even world-wide popularity they once would have needed a record label for. Unsigned artists and acts signed to independent labels reached the top of the iTunes charts before ever being on MTV.

Dane Schmidt, better known as the Minneapolis-based Jamestown Story to his music project’s followers, watched the rise and fall of MySpace as his music has gained world-wide notoriety through social networking sites. Jamestown Story’s song, “Futile Road,” was featured on a January episode of MTV’s “The Real World: DC.”

“It’s frustrating but hopefully something else will pop up that will be the ‘new thing,’” Schmidt said. “In the mean time I’m working to get people coming to jamestownstory.com and making that a good place to discover and listen to Jamestown Story.”

Summers has seen a lot of bands revert to buying their own Web site as well as trying to build followings on Twitter.

“Twitter is great to get updated with bands on a day-to-day basis but it’s nothing like MySpace,” Summers said. “It’s not really an improvement; it’s just the way things are going.”

While many bands remain frustrated for the moment, losing their central outlet to focus their attention on, Summers isn’t overly surprised.

“Things get old,” he said.

Perhaps the lesson for bands is not to put all their eggs in one basket. For now, these musicians will have to roll with the punches.