Iced Earth has discovered Facebook, Still Delusional

There are tons of bands that have Facebook fan pages. From the super popular to the newcomers. Facebook has been the place where bands can truly interact with fans unlike Myspace which became a clusterfuck of graphics and music samples.According to Blabbermouth today Jon Schaffer, the "mastermind" behind Iced Earth, just figured out Facebook's usage for his band this year. Here is the block quote from the article:

"When we launched Minions of the Wicked," Schaffer said, "the real power and usefulness of social-network sites like Facebook was unknown to us. Everyone knew about MySpace. Practically every band was already there. Twitter was more or less still in its infancy. Consequently, very few bands used it. Facebook existed, of course. But it was a big question mark. How could bands like ours use Facebook to keep in touch with fans?"

He continued: "On September 1st of this year, we launched the official Iced Earth Facebook page. We had no idea what would happen. All we knew is that other bands were on Facebook, and hundreds of fans requested that we be on it as well. So we asked our publicist, Bill Murphy, to create the official ICED EARTH Facebook page for us with one stipulation: That he be as passionate about it as he is about our music. He was. And we were blown away by the response we got. In two months' time, we added over 6,400 followers. Over six thousand four hundred! And it grows by nearly 100 per day. In Facebook, we found the perfect way for us to talk to fans, and — more importantly — to hear from them. In real time. We were thrilled."

My reactions after the jump.

Jon Schaffer is one of those guys that drives me crazy. He falls into the same category as Jeff Waters of Annhilator where one guy has complete creative control of a band and is just good enough at it to get a small following and invade the public consciousness but fails to go the next level. And you know why?Because he doesn't delegate or bring people in that can add insight and ideas.This then leads to this inflated sense of self importance that makes the intelligent outsider go "Wow, Jon really?"
News flash genius,Facebook has been around for a few years as an outlet for bands to promote. Charging people for fan clubs is something from the 1990's and was usually done by artists way more successful then Iced Earth.I don't think Jon understands just how unsuccessful Iced Earth has been over the years. No gold records and 1 million albums sold over a course of 26 years? I guess it's a living but it's by no means a success.
I love how he strives to educate about social networking and band promotion when he created the fan club.At the time you were pondering how to use Facebook tons of other bands were already doing it. They were posting news, album releases, and merch items with a link to the web page.Why was that so hard of a concept to think of 5 years ago, Jon?
Here is another section:
"With the world's economy in such rough shape, and people having to scrape together their hard-earned money to buy basic necessities," Schaffer said, "we thought we could best serve our fans by giving them communication, interaction, access to the band, fun giveaways, and exclusive news on Facebook, without charging them a dime."

And just what were you charging people for membership to your fan club? Twenty dollars for a year? Was it really that much that you feel like a hero in a struggling economy and are you so successful now that you can do without that bit of revenue?I seriously doubt that 10,000 fans shirked their duty of feeding their families to buy a membership to your fan club for twenty bucks, man.Let's get over ourselves shall we? I also love that he has a 'publicist' that was given the power to create (queue orchestra)a fan page on Facebook.
Psst....Jon I have a Facebook page too and I didn't need to hire someone to create these things for me. If you're this clueless on marketing yourself and your band these days....then maybe you should put down the conspiracy nut project Sons of Liberty and do some research, dude. Or even better, create albums that are consistently good instead of half baked concepts about movie monsters, comic book characters, and your own version of an L. Ron Hubbard novel.You might get even more fans that could justify this delusional existence Iced Earth has.

Here is a song by Iced Earth that is my all time favorite and I believe would prove my point should Jon Schaffer get his head out of his ass.And it's not the Barlow redo either.