October 27
yvynyl:
Earlier, I linked to the Music Think Tank article without any of my own commentary, but it seems to be generating a lot of discussion so I wanted to add a few thoughts.
While I like the idea of everyone spontaneously quitting MySpace as it exists today, it simply isn’t going to happen. The gist of this ‘Quit MySpace Day’ piece is right on, though. MySpace doesn’t know what it has going for itself and the team there simply can’t capitalize on the unbelievable asset it has developed. Maybe the threat of people quitting will get their asses in gear.
Agreed, Myspace has a goldmine of content that they aren’t anywhere close to properly utilizing. I do, however, think that they know they are threat of being completely invalid. People are abandoning Myspace in droves and if they don’t innovate to some degree, they’ll fade away like Friendster. They even admit to it.
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).
With that mindset no one will ever leave MySpace because something new will always be something foreign. MySpace was once a playground for savvier nerds and thanks to those early adopters it has become the ghetto it is today. I would also argue that MySpace is less of a benefit for getting the word out to fans than it ever has been. Maybe I’m just ignorant to my own nerdiness but I assume Twitter / Facebook have really taken the throne.
Another really important thing to remember - MySpace doesn’t require any ‘learning curve’ by the general public. Pretty much everyone knows how to operate it - and everyone knows how to find and connect with bands there. That alone is a huge deal. Even though it hurts to say it, you want to make connecting as smooth as possible, and MySpace give bands that opportunity.
I guess my question on this point is - do people really connect on Myspace or just load up profiles and listen to the music? I can’t remember the last time I requested the friendship of a band on ANY service. For me, the Myspace profile just serves as a way to listen to them, not keep in touch. Is this atypical?
Many of us are simply yearning for the MySpace Music team to take the greatness they have (audience) and start building more functional, open and clean tools for band promotion and management within that structure. The potential is so obvious and so huge anyone even remotely connected with web and music can see it plainly. Why can’t MySpace?
Again, agreed 100%. MySpace is wasting a huge amount of potential but the ability to change it significantly is an enormous order. They would have to have some seriously forward thinking leadership in order to make any of these proposed changes happen even in a small way.. and I just don’t see that happening. I’d love to be wrong but they are an enormous corporate entity now - progressive, innovative change is just not synonymous with their existence.
Arcade Fire’s partially re-recorded version of “Wake Up” pulled on all of our heartstrings recently in the Where The Wild Things Are trailer, but the song isn’t actually in the film, you see, nor is it on Karen O and the Kids’ official soundtrack.
