music culture

MySpace And Music Culture

MySpace Guide for DJs

October 17, 2006

-Adam Singer

MySpace is ubiquitous in the world of clubbing culture and electronic music (and pretty much any other interest you can imagine, for that matter). With over 95,000 artists on the site who classify themselves as electronic, you can find everyone from next generation DJs like Chris Salt and Vitaliy to legends like Sasha and Stryke. Many artists are finding it an excellent resource to find new ears for their music to reach and countless promoters are successfully leveraging it as a tool to spread the good word about their events.

As much as I’ve complained about MySpace in the past, it does have an obvious presence in music culture that we can’t ignore – especially with the site potentially emerging as a major player in the digital music industry. And putting power back in the hands of artists is always a good thing.

That’s about as far as the positives of MySpace extend – now for the negatives.

The site design is both unattractive and unintuitive, their servers are worthless, and the interface is buggier than a summer night in Florida. With such a large user base, and the fact that everyone is in your extended network, it’s trying to do too much on too large of a scale in too disorganized a way to be useful – you’ll end up going nowhere fast. The advertisements are obnoxious, and the spam accounts are a pain. And almost every page breaks even the most basic rules of web design. They really need to take a cue from Facebook.

In the realm of music and clubbing culture, MySpace has generated its own niche set of annoyances we can all empathize with.

A list best organizes what really grinds my gears (thank you, Peter Griffin):

Promotions: Hearing about events posted by an artist or promoter or new releases/mixes from an artist is great, but stick to one bulletin to tell us – we’ll see it. Incessantly flooding the bulletin board or spamming friends with messages/invites is just going to get you deleted without remorse.

Top Friends: If you’re an up-and-coming DJ and your ‘top friends’ reads like an Ibiza album, change that right now. If at least five out of eight of those people are actually your friends in real life, you’re excused. Remember, having stood in the stall next to Digweed at Pacha doesn’t count. While having an artist or two who inspires you in your ‘top friends’ is cool, try to keep your page true to yourself. It communicates much better that way and your ego won’t come off as big as Tiesto’s.

Artist bios: Your MySpace page isn’t your artist homepage. Pasting your 1000 word bio with no spacing between paragraphs, over a clashing background is essentially worthless, let alone readable. Speaking of which, you already have your 1000-word bio on your website. You’re missing the point of having a page on a social network by pasting it here. Make a summary and provide a link to your homepage. You want your MySpace page to drive traffic to your artist website where you can disseminate your message in a controlled manner – not with ads for singles sites surrounding it.

Artists with thousands upon thousands of friends: This doesn’t necessarily mean said artist is any good. Being huge on MySpace does not translate into being a talented artist. I trust everyone reading this knows better, but you’d be surprised how many people blindly follow artists that have the illusion of a following (or even a real following). The popular choice is (arguably) the wrong choice with music – many smaller names are making better music, anyway, and with the right intentions. Someone with fewer friends is more focused on creating their music than promoting it, because they are doing it for the right reasons. It shows in their art, too.

“Thanks for the Support” artist banners: Posting those huge “thanks for the support” images on your friends’ pages is tacky, and makes you look not only unprofessional, but obnoxious. A quick line of text is okay, but your friends’ pages are just that – their page, not yours. Would you want someone to stick a giant billboard in your front yard with my name on it? I hope not. Also, posting a link to your new mix or new track on a big name artist’s page is pretty disrespectful to that artist, and looks like you’re just trying to ride their coattails. Do I even need to go into how inane the “vote for me in the DJ list” images are?

I might regret this later, but I suppose it’s only fair to link my MySpace page with today’s column for you to see. It’s stark, but that’s on purpose – I’m trying to be clear and concise. And I ask you only “add me” if you actually want to communicate with me.

There are many more grievances and clichés in the MySpace music world, and even the MySpace world overall. Since Clubplanet embraces talkback, feel free to post below your own MySpace pet peeve to share with the rest of us.

http://www.clubplanet.com/news/archive/myspace_guide_for_djs.asp

© 2005-2009 Adam Singer.