“For the music fan, the only sensible solution is to assume that a high number of MySpace play counts or a MySpace chart appearance may not mean anything.“
Sometimes people inquire as to why I repeatedly delete music profiles from Myspace.com (as well as other indie artists-some of whom I work with).
Some even act as if Myspace is “the music scene” online, and as if those artists which do not have pages there are not active or don’t even exist.
Even some major record labels, venue owners and music-industry “big-wigs” rely on Myspace pages to judge the popularity of artists, either as a judge for selling potential or booking priority.
This falsehood, I believe, has only added to the failure of a music industry as a whole in recent years.
Even aside from the current accusations of corporate espionage & hacking against Myspace owner NewsCorp’s CEO Rupert Murdoch, the idea that Myspace is a reliable way to judge either the artistic content or general popularity of an artist is preposterous!
The reasons why are myriad, and are not limited to the following:
1. MySpace Play Count Inflaters: The Steroids of the Music Industry.
The play “counters” on myspace are basically useless for any artist or label who doesn’t have the money or unscrupulous business methods to “inflate” their plays to 500+ per day.
2. Even without “inflaters”, the real amount of people who like a song is not realistically “countable”.
a. Myspace players do not count how many people are playing the songs on their own personal pages, which is the majority of music-listening done on myspace. With the large amount of computer-slowing designer code, adverts, videos and images on most band pages, most listeners only visit the music page once to click “Add to profile” so they can repeatedly listen to it on their own page.
b. Whenever a myspace music page loads, a song starts, and there is no way to tell who pressed “Stop” right after the song started. Thus, the first song that loads always looks more “popular”, even if everyone who went to the page hated it and stopped it after 2 seconds.
3. MySpace Music Won’t Give Equity to Indie Bands.
“Three of the four major labels have become partners in MySpace Music, which will extend MySpace’s current musical offerings to merchandise, song downloads and more.”
“MySpace Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe (pictured right) said that while MySpace is open to offering an equity deal similar to what the majors got to “the right partners,” indie bands unaffiliated with an agreggator like The Orchard or a major label like Universal will not receive any the general revenue generated by MySpace Music.”
My label (Noctis Cultus) tried to affiliate with aggregator “The Orchard” who completely ripped us off, never fulfilling their service of distributing our music, and we currently have a claim against them with the Better Business Bureau. So it seems that only “major indie” artists (the type who can afford to advertise on myspace) are actually getting a chance at equity, even with an aggregator comapny.
4. Even artistic content cannot be properly judged, because Myspace censors & deletes!
Many indie / alternative / “underground” artists not only have images deleted without warning, but oftentimes, entire accounts are deleted without warning. Often, the material being deleted is not generally disallowed on other servers/sites, or illegal. After so many times re-setting up pages just to have them altered or deleted, some artists simply begin to leave out certain elements of their imagery and/or other content so they can keep their pages.
Not only does this throw a monkey wrench into marketing for indie-level artists & bands (who may have only posted artistic material which was misunderstood) have to keep re-finding their fans, but it also creates a situation where certain artists who may actually have content which is likely to be found extremely offensive simply hide those elements. Thus, no one can really tell who/what they are actually supporting.
If a band is racist or has otherwise extremist politics, I would prefer them to be able to show that on their page, so that I can avoid supporting them.
However, myspace likes to lump in Art with hate, extremist politics and porn, so who knows who is who?
Also, now to be able to censor material that is not even uploaded to myspace, but which may be posted at myspace, they devalued and then purchased Photobucket, the most popular free image hosting site.
So now they can delete your art, even if you don’t upload it at myspace.
Add this problem to the “inflater” epidemic and you can have racists and extremists appearing to be hugely popular, so long as they don’t upload any photos of burnt Jews or hanged Blacks, while other people who are just making music and trying to get it heard are getting crushed in the mêlée, especially if they are Queer or have an alternative religion, which seems to get a lot of people and artists deleted.
Here are Just a few of the many people taking issue with the lack of Freedom of Expression on the world’s largest “social networking” site:
a. MySpace Freedom of Speech Initiative
b. Free Myspace and CensorSpace (created by a former Myspace admin)
c. MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites
Although I still sometimes use myspace, partially just to be a thorn in the censor’s side, and partially for promotion, I am sure to make it clear that I do not try to use it for any serious business, and reserve that type of activity for email.
