More on 'Quit MySpace Day'
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.
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).
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.
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?
We’d all love to make some changes to myspace - but it still fills a void - design, streaming, download, discovery and e-marketing. does bandcamp and soundcloud do this? no. Very different capacities. Should we dump facebook just because as users we’re all using Twitter more and more? hell no. And Myspace is no longer about ‘networking’ but from a music / artist point of view, is there an alternative? No. It seems to me that all the musc tech guys want us to bin myspace, whilst all those that still use it for music discovery and a very very quick overview of a band - still rather like it. Interesting none-the-less
