More on ‘Quit MySpace Day’
Several of you folks have called for bands to simply abandon MySpace and head for a better service like Bandcamp or SoundCloud. One big problem with that. No one on earth knows about these services yet, save, what, a few thousand savvier nerds? Don’t get me wrong, I love these services - they do so many things right. But c’mon. If you’re a band, you have to be where the people are and MySpace has the audience (see my previous post on this subject here).
We’d all love to make some changes to myspace - but it still fills a void - design, streaming, download, discovery and e-marketing. does bandcamp and soundcloud do this? no. Very different capacities. Should we dump facebook just because as users we’re all using Twitter more and more? hell no. And Myspace is no longer about ‘networking’ but from a music / artist point of view, is there an alternative? No. It seems to me that all the musc tech guys want us to bin myspace, whilst all those that still use it for music discovery and a very very quick overview of a band - still rather like it. Interesting none-the-less
It doesn’t take much to get MySpace to just ‘work’ for a band. Throw some MP3s up there, make ‘friends’ with all the other bands you hang out with/are influenced by, put up a status update once in a while, and you’re done.
For an enthusiast looking for new music, this is perfect! I friend pretty much every band that looks okay because it doesn’t have a huge impact on my use of the service. If I were to do that on Facebook - I’d be drowning in updates, masking all my ‘real’ friends. For me, Facebook = real people I know/knew, Twitter = internet people I want to know, MySpace = bands it’d be cool to have a drink with.
