6 Reasons Not To Quit MySpace
Yesterday, my Hypebot collegue Kyle Bylin celebrated the first anniversary of Andrew Dubber's Quit MySpace Day, even offering instructions for quitting. Blogger Steve Lawson agreed: "…it’s become almost exclusively the domain of spammers and blanket marketeers – musicians shouting at other musicians about gigs by bad bands on the wrong side of the world."
Dubber even updated his call: "MySpace is not simply irrelevant, it’s utterly poisonous." They're all right. MySpace is a mess on many levels, but I still believe that every artist needs to maintain an account there. Here's why:
6 Reasons Not To Quit MySpace:
1. Eyeballs
Nearly 60 million unique visitors viewed 500 million pages on MySpace last month. Those numbers may be smaller than a year ago, but they are are still significant. And I don't buy the argument that most of them are other musicians.
2. Search Rank
Search for most bands and MySpace will usually appear as one of the top 5 results. Can you afford to have fans click on that link and find a dead or out of date MySpace page?
3. MySpace Is Still Mostly About Music
There are some good music add-ons for Facebook, but MySpace is still about music at its core. A place about music attracts fans and bands should want to be where fans are.
4. It's Easy
MySpace not be pretty, but it is easy. Services like Hoote Sutie to Sonicbid's ArtistData make it simple to keep multiple social networks up to date simultaneously.
5. If Other's Aren't There…
Be a contrarian. If some artists are quiting MySpace or leaving pages unattended, that decreases the competition for those 60 million pairs of eyes.
6. The Makeover
MySpace is in the middle of a major makeover. I'm as skeptical as you are that it won't help. (Check out their absurd new logo). But is it smart to delete your account before we find out?
Do you still see value in MySpace or are you quitting?
More: Happy Quit Myspace Day! Delete Your Account Now.
I think as long as you don’t spend hours and hours of time on MySpace, there’s no real harm in keeping it ticking over by updating your shows and songs, plus the occasional blog post (copy & pasted from elsewhere) or photo.
No visitor spends more than 5-10 mins listening to music and looking for shows on a MySpace page when they discover a new artist (usually via that top 5 Google rank you mentioned), so there is very little point ploughing time and energy into a profile that no one spends any real time on.
As long as you have the songs and shows covered, along with big obvious links to your website, email list, other social networks and possibly your videos then you don’t really need to do a lot else.
None of this will take much time, so surely it’s better to have *some* presence in MySpace (even if it’s not an active presence like Facebook or Twitter) than none at all?
I didn’t want to quit myspace, for another reason: I don’t agree with the “…it’s become almost exclusively the domain of spammers and blanket marketeers – musicians shouting at other musicians about gigs by bad bands on the wrong side of the world.” part, and, instead, I find it a valuable platform (which I don’t like, but it’s where people are) for finding gigs, contacting with labels, distributors, other bands for collaboration and so on. Yet, I’m quitting myspace – slowly. I’m a musician and have three different musical projects. One of them is already announcing it will leave myspace, the two others will take more time but will follow the same path. If you want to read the “we’re leaving myspace” message, with the reasoning behind it, here it is:
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=465227544&blogId=540066787
To sum up, the reason is pretty simple actually, and it was hinted by Andrew Dubber in the “Now With Glitter” blog post (here: http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/myspace-now-with-glitter.html ): each band on myspace is giving money to their biggest enemy – the major labels. I’m sorry, but I despise them and what they are doing to destroy artists and music lovers like me, and I’m surely not willing to give them – direct or indirectly – any money so they can keep their fight against art. So yes, I’m quitting MySpace.
I agree on ranking into google, here are the first five links when I type my name (rank might differ from a location to another) :
1- personal blog & website
2- tumblr blog
3- an old blog I’m featured in for a long time
4- my old french website which redirects to my new one
5- myspace
then twitter, a blog, lastfm, an irrelevant link, and another blog…
facebook appears on the 4th page…
It doesn’t mean I enjoy myspace, but I keep my account. I don’t use their player, but embedded my bandcamp players instead…
No time spent there, just another presence around… and a link to my main website…
Laurent.
“I’m as skeptical as you are that it won’t help.”
Huh?
Being skeptical means you don’t think something is true. So if you’re skeptical that it won’t help, you’re saying you think it WILL help. Double negative and all that.
On page rank: after my band deleted our Myspace page months ago, our own website has jumped to the top result for our name. Personally, that’s where I’d rather a random visitor land.
I think counting the number of users across the network is misleading. The real question for Myspace and any other social network is whether fans are spending as much time on your page as you are. If you’ve been around for a few months but still aren’t getting views, comments, or click-throughs to your store then you’re only creating more work for yourself and broadcasting a confusing/disorganized web presence.
Another question: If a potential fan only has 5 minutes to spend, how many of those minutes do you want them to spend on your Myspace page? They can promise all the new templates they want, but I doubt anyone would honestly choose to hand over those five minutes to Tron: Legacy or Laughing Cow.
I agree that there really is no reason to quit MySpace entirely, but other than updating songs, tour dates, and syndicating your blog, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on the site. I’ve spent a lot of time on many of the big platforms and tangible engagement is dramatically lower on MySpace compared to almost all the other sites I go on. Everything on MySpace feels robotic and impersonal at this point.
As a music journalist, when searching for new talent and upcoming bands, I’ve come accustomed to instantly just heading to the artist’s MySpace, regardless of where it stands in Google rankings. MySpace has always been there and is one of the simplest ways to post your music online, even if the player has degraded over the years. I would personally rather go to an artist’s MySpace over the own .com any day. Also, I might add, as a journalist I find that I spend a little more than five minutes on the artists MySpace.
Myspace can easily be set to auto pilot by combining RSS, Ping.fm, and other such services. No need to kill it. Just feed it with updated info, and make sure its sole purpose is to drive traffic to your OFFICIAL SITE!
Oh yeah, find someone who is not design-challenged to get rid of those bulky graphics and numerous videos & banners that plague the average amateur band on Myspace!
Seems to me like MySpace has become the Internet equivalent of those ladies at the supermarket that invite you to taste the new kinds of cheese and crackers, or BBQ sauce, behind their tiny table in some corner.
A small but important role if you want folks (that are fans of that band you’re opening for next Friday, for example) to sample your tunes and convert some of them to paying customers. But yeah, you should direct them asap to your own website, where you control the experience, the narrative, the mailing list, and where you can eventually sell your tracks and merch.
Wow! MySpace is still going?
The comments on Kyle’s post were quite interesting and not very kind for Kyle and Andrew Dubber.
I still think that Kyle and Andrew are one of the most thought-provoking people in the (digital) music business. But their point of quitting MySpace is mainly a good ideological stance.
But my bands will not quit MySpace soon, because it would be a bad business decision, for all the reasons Bruce mentions. Kyle and Andrew are right about MySpace, but they are not in the position to make such a controversial business decision. So, it’s easy for them to say: let’s do it.
Quitting MySpace would only work if a couple of influential artists would leave en masse and would convince a serious of bunch artists to leave all together. But this is not going to happen when we get the message on Hypebot and Andrew’s blog. There are too many business interests involved…
As for whether or not to quit – I dunno. But I just went through a pretty massive artist site renovation, including bio and photo updates, and the like. Also updated all the attendent social media places – FB, Reverbnation, AirplayDirect, etc…. but when it came to updating mySpace, their interface wouldn’t make any of the changes. It got me to thinking – how often to I actually use mySpace anymore? Which is 0% – I have to remind myself to visit once a week.
So I did an informal poll on both FB and Twitter, and asked people how many of them still used MySpace.
Out of every single answer, only one responded yes. The rest – 98% said no… and the rest shared a witticism like “What’s that?” 🙂
MySpace failed when they tried to become a bastardized version of Twitter. No, wait… facebook. 🙂
I still see value in MySpace
As a consumer, I agree with James Clarke above: keep a minimal presence, don’t quit entirely.
I don’t trawl MySpace looking for new music, but I do use it as a quick reference when an artist catches my attention from some other media — local tour poster, internet radio, news or magazine article — to play some songs and see if I want to follow up further on learning about the artist, and to see if the artist is playing near me in the imminent future. Having those quick free songs available IN A STANDARD FORMAT is a valuable resource for me.
(The artist may prefer that I go to the artist’s own website, and maybe I will. But, shit, the site is taking a long time to load all that Flash crap. Where are the sample songs? Oh crap, one started playing automatically on top of the internet radio show I was listening to!! In contrast, MySpace is quick and dependable.)
look. if you’re still spending anytime on myspace. you are wasting that time. stick a fork in that bird, its dead and gone. on to the next one.
Most of the Indies I know either go to an artist personal site or myspace when they want to listen to their music.
Any and all social network sites you can link together are important because you never know where a fan is going to come from. Fans are what should be the most important to any/all artist.
One true blue fan a month is worth an extra $1200 + / year. 2 = $2400….etc. For an Indie, every penny is important.
YOU CAN PUT LIPSTICK ON A PIG BUT IT’S STILL A PIG
Great, another platform for me to vent my spleen!
Use myspace for one thing…to put a header up to re-direct people to your web page. In fact if anyone out there wants to build a site using get-ctrl (check it out http://www.get-ctrl.com) I’ll get the guys to build the header for free.
I try to look at about 100 mySpace sites a day and manage some and therefore I reckon I have a good handle on what’s good and what isn’t.
1. Eyeballs
Yep, grab them and send them to your website. This is the only place you own on the internet.
2. Search Rank
You will come out top if you have a url that is the band name searched for and the content on your site mentions the name in the first few words. Again have a mySpace page that says ‘We don’t use mySpace’ and a link to the website
3. MySpace Is Still Mostly About Music
MySpace is about advertising…end of. In the UK we haven’t got the new deign but teams of sales people are out selling ad space already. Rupert Murdoch is out to get his money back.
4. It’s Easy
I don’t think it is. Also by having to use other services to make things work, you’re making it harder for yourself and when MySapce change something chances are it’ll break the links.
6. The Makeover
You can put Lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig
Don’t forget we’re talking about a platform that they have said only has a short amount of time before, if it’s not working, they’re switching off.
Please don’t get left in the dark.
Hello Jody of doubledance.ca…”get alternative.” wow. How “alternative” are you, anyway? I can see why you’d be leery of going to an artist website, considering the site you write for takes just as long to load as MySpace, and is equally garish and ad-laden. But unlike MySpace, you’d have to figure out how to navigate the sucker, just so you can get to some regurgitated press releases. You will never write about my band, and I will never shed a tear over that. The world has enough spoon-fed music “journalists” who need to be told what to like, and what to write, just to provide something to slap flashing ads over. My site is WordPress driven, open source and search-engine friendly. It’s for people who give a shit.
myspace should go back to it’s simple roots – it was the best and could be again. everybody loved it!