photo by Julie Schuchard
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Pretty much everyone I know has a MySpace page these days. We even have one for rightround, and I have one for my radio station. I'm always surprised when I try to look up a band on MySpace and find that they aren't on it — it's becoming more and more rare. On top of that, most people, including band members, seem to have their own personal MySpace pages.
What did MySpace do that was so right that everyone uses it? I heard somewhere that it's one of the top ten most-visited websites on the Internet. I mean, damn — that's a lot of traffic.
I think MySpace has been a great thing for the music industry. It gives bands an easy way to make a web page and provide music samples. You can list your label, or say that you're looking for a label; you can put up your tour schedule, and even have sales links on your page. If you're an unsigned band, it's a great way to get yourself out there and promote your stuff. You can put up lots of pictures of the bass player that all the girls swoon over, and you'll have hundreds of people wanting to be your new friend and leaving you comments about how much you rock. It's created a bridge between artists and listeners, and it's connected people around the world in a way that Friendster, Tribe, and several other "community" sites only dreamed of doing.
That's all pretty great stuff. It makes it easy for someone like me: When I'm trudging through lists of new bands, listener requests, and suggestions for my radio show, I just look up the band in question on MySpace and listen to their stuff there — the right address is almost always myspace.com/bandname. I don't have to Google the band, then go through their personal website and their label's website searching for mp3s to check them out. I like that functionality. I also like all the information bands are supposed to fill in for their pages, including lists of band members, label, label type, and location. This is all valuable information that most bands somehow manage to forget to include on their websites. And I've made friends via MySpace that I'm really glad I know. It really does connect people.
Despite all this, MySpace sucks. I mean, it really sucks. It's slow, it crashes all the time (I guess all that traffic is a bad thing after all), and it's so damn ugly that it makes me want to cry half the time. I hate the way their search functions work. If you've ever tried to use their calendaring system, you know it's an incredibly slow pile of poo, and I hate the way nothing really works quite right on my Mac.
Then there's MySpace's legal stuff: they claim that when you put something up on your MySpace page, be it something you wrote, or a photo, or whatever, they now own that content. What? How can they own a photo my photographer friend took, or a song my friends wrote and that their label
actually owns? It's like YouTube claiming they own everything uploaded to them, including episodes of the TV show The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. Doesn't the station own those?
Most of all, I absolutely hate the mostly-naked chicks in the contorted yoga-esque poses with their butts and boobs in curious and highly suspect positions, claiming they want to be "models" — and the gross, creepy guys who "collect" them as friends. I suppose some of this suckage has to do with MySpace's popularity: as anything becomes more and more popular, it loses much of the appeal that it previously held. But MySpace has always been ugly, and they've always let people CSS their page half to death until it's basically illegible, with 2000-pixel-wide content against whatever loud background they've chosen. And let's not forget the ads for the personals services that are all tits and ass — I love those. I'm not even going to touch on the whole kiddie aspect of the site that's been under fire lately.
Overall, if we didn't have MySpace, I think the Internet would be a sadder place for it. But I don't think I'd protest too much if all the great bands out there got up and decided to leave it for something prettier and faster — although I doubt that will ever happen, or at least not anytime soon.
What do you think of MySpace? Do you love it or hate it?
Posted August 2006
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djlab commented, on August 17, 2006 at 7:21 a.m.:
Hey Elise Nordling.
You wanna hear something that is REALLY going to make you think that MySpace sucks in the biggest most horrible way?
I couldn't believe I hadn't heard this before, but Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace a year ago.
And you know what happens when one of the biggest media moguls (head honcho of the horrific News Corporation) owns all of that content you were talking about including all of our profiles, blogs, etc?
uh, yeah. Big Brother, indeed!
Thanks for the blog,
DJLab