No, it doesn’t. There are a ton of excellent musicians in Australia that I’ll bet you’ve never heard of and who don’t get played on your stations.
Not all musicians can afford to send out demos. Not all musicians are interested in “making it” and getting airplay. They make music for the sheer love of making music. Not all musicians know who to send music to or how to go about packaging it so that their music stands out from all the rest.
The stations probably receive dozens or maybe even hundreds of CDs and demo tapes a week, you think they have time to listen to ALL of them? Do you think that all good music automatically bubbles up to the top of the pile? Do you think that all DJs and program directors automatically know what’s good music even if they do hear it? You yourself said that most of what your station plays is crap. Does that mean you think what they’re playing is the best of the bunch and everything else has to be even worse? Have you never been interested in an artist that you thought was excellent but was not getting airplay or sales? Do you think that music that isn’t “radio-friendly” is all automatically bad? How did you get to be so sheltered from reality that your attitude is “if it’s not on the radio, it’s not any good”?
“schmidy” is confused: “thnx 4 the add who is this tho”
“david” just figured out how this interweb works: “Do I know you??? Why would you want to add a MARRIED man that you dont even know to your friends list???”
“NEX” didn’t realize that it was contagious until now: “THANX FOR THE ADD.”
“kevin” thinks desperation is tre cute: “i added you to my friends and i am glad i did you are very beautiful”
Excellent in your opinion, godawful in mine- I just don’t care that much about music, to be honest. I like what I like and I’ve yet to be impressed by a band that didn’t have at least some radio airplay (which can include being on TV in some form or another). Your results obviously vary.
Why wouldn’t they? That’s their job. It’s a bit like asking Peter Brock or Craig Lowndes if they’d know a “good car” if they saw one.
Basically.
No.
Not at all- I think a lot of what’s on the radio is crap, which is why I don’t listen to it much anymore. I guess I’m just not a music person. Still, the BBC World Service, ABC NewsRadio, and NPR keep me entertained, but I they would bore most people to tears. I can’t see us agreeing on anything here anytime soon.
How the hell would you know if you’ve never heard them??
That’s obviously the problem. You’re not into music so you know nothing about it. Whatever, but you’re content to let mass media tell you what to think and like, and you don’t even know enough to be embarrassed by that.
Because DJs and/or radio programmers can have shitty taste in music just like regular people. I’ve heard the most awful music on Community and College stations. At commercial stations, the DJs usually have to play what they’re told to play, and the programmers either play what they’re told to play, or on their own play what will keep people listening between commercials.
See, that’s just it. You know very little about MySpace, yet you condemn it and all the people on it. You know very little about music, but are content to believe that what’s being played is the best of the best and that all the music that doesn’t get played is even crappier. You’re narrow-minded and seem proud of it. If that’s what Fogeyism is about, someone shoot me if I ever start showing signs of it.
What fucking “case in point”? That no matter what anyone else says, you’re committed to your ignorant opinion that ALL of MySpace is like that? No one’s arguing that there aren’t morons on MySpace, but I can stay away from shit like that and never see it. You go looking for it when it would really be just as easy and better for your mind to go looking for the quality pages.
Damn, I screwed up the formatting. Why can’t you report your own posts I wonder? Is any mod reading this? Could you please fix my bout of brain damage? Thanks.
I’m not sure why we can’t report our own posts either, I think it’s a software limitation. Anyhow, I believe the accepted convention is to report a post just above or beneath yours and explain the problem in the box provided. In fact, I have just done so with a mis-coded post of mine in another thread.
Geez guy. Unless your life depends on the ubermencsh triumph of myspace, I don’t get you. That’s nice that its okay in some places. My point was simply that I don’t understand how such awful awful web design can still exist in this day and age when there is no earthly need for it. It’s like polio victims in the middle of Case Western. It makes no sense.
I don’t get people who (seem to) condemn the entirety of MySpace based on what some idiots do. You might as well condemn the entire World Wide Web. Bad web pages have not gone away, they’ve just been ridiculed so much nobody thinks about them anymore. And now we have Flash pages that are stupid and useless that drive people away. Bands/solo artists are especially prone to preferring “cool” looking web sites over fan’s convenience. They are, in essence, telling a portion of their fans to go fuck off. That’s my biggest pet peeve. MySpace may have some awful pages and moronic users, but at least people without Flash can see the pages (well, unless said moron uses a background that makes the text unreadable). Flash runs the music players but CSS is what drives the look of the individual pages and CSS degrades gracefully no matter what browser you’re using. (of course I realize that not all browsers read CSS the exact same way)
I’ll often tell people to forget going to a band’s official site if it stinks of Flash, and tell them to go to the band’s/artist’s MySpace page.
Some people don’t know what they’re doing. It’s as simple as that. It’s that way everywhere you go on the web. I’m not sure why you’re singling out MySpace when it’s just as bad everywhere.
But the difference is that myspace is a corporate website with some pretty basic design control. And that control is awful. The standard layouts are terrible the options horrendous, and the organization is insane. This isn’t simply the fault of really dumb people. This is a plug and play system where you have to put lots and lots of effort into making something that doesn’t look like a reject from geocities circa 1998. There’s just no good explanation for that. If you manage to use it and get pleasure out of that use, more power to you. But just because you made a delicious sandwhich out of some moldy bread doesn’t mean that its in general a bad and pointless idea to start off with moldy bread instead of fresh.
The fleeting thought of putting up my own myspace now leaves my head…
But not because of this thread. I was linked to a fellow student’s(yep, a sample size of one) and I must say that perhaps it IS a generational thing. She is in her mid-twenties and seemed intelligent(she’s in grad school, afterall-she must have some brains). Her taste must all be in her mouth, though. And it’s all a bit egotistical, no? HERE I AM! LOOK AT ME!!! Her page blinks and twirls and would give a migraine sufferer a severe episode. Look! She used to figure skate! She married a fireman! She is “liberal in ethics and conservative in politics” (I wonder how that works…). I know TOO MUCH about her; she is an acquaitance. I dont’ want to know this much about her and not only that, I don’t care that she hates zucchini and finds so and so hot.
None of us are that exciting or interesting to sustain entire pages. Truly. I agree with sampiro --it’s all teddy bears and hearts and sexxxxxxy wimmen or it’s all Goth and dark and snark 'cause that signifies a Deeper Understanding of Life. Where are those intelligent, mature, musically inclined pages that are so hotly defended? They haven’t appeared in this thread.
I don’t understand the phenomenom. My daughter has one, but she also is 16 years old. I’m assuming that she’ll grow out of her desire to always wear Chuck Taylor’s, too.
Doesn’t the very fact that ones feels compelled to post a page(regardless of appearance) about oneself cry out, “look at me; I matter”? Not being bitchy, just askin’.
First, I’ll fully support the “crappy design” point. It’s hard to not fuck up your page on that site. If you want to personalize anything at all (and you’re like me with not too terribly much coding ability), you have to go to one of those layout sites. Problem is: 99.9% (true statistic, I swear) are chock full of awful, blinking, swirling, flashing, scrolling, eye-pain-inducing, light text on a light background layouts. It’s hard to find a decent one.
That said, I like having my MySpace pretty colors. I try not to make it obnoxious and I also make sure it’s readable (it’s currently black text in yellow text boxes, then *those * are on a swirly background-- because of the layout, everything is perfectly clear). I’m slightly irked that I’m suddenly considered a “bimbo” because I like nice colors on my page. Sheesh. Sorry. I guess us young people are dumb asses! I suppose it’s a good thing that we wont be in charge of you fogies in the future, right?
Anywho, it certainly is a generational thing. I’ll fully admit that I generally find it strange to see a 30-something + with a profile. There’s no reason for my bias, of course. It is just that, for the longest time, MySpace was a young thing- particularly when I was back in high school.
Which gets me to my main point: MySpace is the best way to keep in touch with my old friends from high school. Not everyone has AIM, not everyone has Yahoo, and it’s hassle to write and respond to emails (you know, my generation does have a much shorter attention span than previous ones :D). MySpace is quick, easy, and a fun way to keep in touch. Yes, the site has a shitty set up and yes, the site goes down on a quarter-an-hour basis. But right now, My Space is the biggest, most common, easiest to use service out there. Even though there may be something better, it’s certainly more obsecure and not going to make it any easier to find my old friends.
I hadn’t thought of it like that-as a vehicle for communication and fostering of RL relations. Perhaps I should think of it as some kind of odd video phone. I thought it was for folks who wanted to tell the world just how great they are–and frankly, failing at it…
Thanks for giving me another perspective. There is nothing wrong with liking colors etc, but too much can make stuff hard to read.
Yeah, the only people on my list that I don’t know IRL are Dopers that added me after the various “share your myspace/yahoo/aim/blood type” threads. I probably get 15-20 friends requests a day- all from men. Sometimes, those requests will be in addition to a message that says something like, “Y0 mammmi i think ure fizzzzzzzzine like u lok reel suffistikated.” Swear to God, that is a direct quote from one I got a while ago. For the longest time, I was posting all of my funny messages on my journal (under the tag MySpace Idiots), but I’ve given up on that. The point is: those people don’t get added.
And I fully agree on the too much color thing. My current layout is readable, just bright. I was looking to change it earlier, actually, but everything was down.
Yes, it’s a big-business website now that Fox has gotten hold of it, but that’s a recent development, postdating the implementation of the page design which we see today.
