It was essential in 2007 for a band to have a myspace page but I’m coming across a few bands of late that don’t bother maintaining one. Has everything migrated to facebook? I tried out facebook but found it irritating to use for music so haven’t bothered with it. Myspace seems to be entirely populated by bands now rather than any fans any more. It is handy for checking out a band you’ve heard of but I’m not really sure how much benefit it is to a band to have a myspace page any more. I suppose it is easier to maintain a myspace than a standalone website.
crickets chirping
Yeah, it’s dead.
For unsigned bands or bands without booking agents it’s still pretty essential. This means that if you are a local band that wants to play shows, Myspace is necessary. That’s primarily how I book bands these days if they have no agent. Otherwise, yea, Facebook does everything so much better/less annoying.
According to some (no idea as to veracity of this claim) black people have increasingly adopted myspace as the favored social networking site vs facebook.
As far as I’ve been able to tell lately it’s all just ugly fat cholas and those guys who pretend to be tough to impress said cholas.
EDIT: Interestingly, just last night I posted a bulletin telling my friends that I was deleting that worthless profile in a few days and that if they didn’t get with the times and join me on Facebook, then to have fun living in the past.
That’s part of the appeal though. All those annoying-ass myspace pages with their crappy music blasting get old fast. Yeah, I know you can mute it or turn off your speakers, but that’s not something I usually want to do.
Was at a clinic the Canadian Brass gave at Emory University this afternoon.
The audience was mostly Emory students, naturally, music students in general, with a few teachers/older musicians like myself sitting in.
At one point Chuck Dallenbach was talking about how they originally marketed the group and how much things have changed. And he was talking about all the ways the Canadian Brass puts themselves in the public eye today and how they want to reach out to their target audience, which is not only music students, of course – in fact music students are the least of it, as they want people who can afford to buy tickets and merchandise, of course.
Anyway, Chuck informally polled the crowd to see what they were using for social networking for themselves and their music projects. Facebook? Nearly every hand in the crowd shot up. MySpace? ONE person, one of the older folks. Twitter? Not a single hand.
I’m seeing a lot of MySpace sites for musicians who are dead – it is very weird to find pages for Don Ellis, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans. I’m glad their music is getting the exposure but it’s kinda creepy too. Maybe that’s part of the problem.
BTW, my favorite MySpace page: Howard Johnson | Listen and Stream Free Music, Albums, New Releases, Photos, Videos