MySpace is My Headache

This blog pretty much wrote itself.

Okay, so what’s wrong with MySpace?

Well, initially it was a great site to help promote your music and/or product/service. However with increasing popularity it has become too restrictive to use as a promotional tool. And let’s face it, that’s what most people were utilizing it for. I mean c’mon, who needs 10,000 “friends”?

But for a moment, let’s take away the promotion side, and evaluate MySpace as a conduit for New Artists. As a Record Executive, I feel I’m in a pretty strong position to comment on this.

First off, MysSpace takes forever to surf and it’s waaaay too slow. Further, it’s poorly organized for basic searches. For example, if I wanted to do a search for “dance music”, I can do it, but it will only display people with “dance” in their screen name. And frankly, who has the foresight to include “dance” in their title name when signing up. Further, if you’re known by your artist name, like our artist “Ohsha Kai” you’re going to use that for your title name, and unfortunately no one’s going to find you in a search unless they know you already.

Another problem is that people have too much stuff on their site. If it takes more than 10 seconds to load, chances are I’m moving on. And please get rid of all the “pimpmyspace” stuff. It’s all distracting, annoying and slow. The more stuff there is, the less likely I’m going to see anything that really matters, which is your music. It’s the old KISS rule (keep it simple stupid).

Now let’s talk about sending a message. If you don’t know the person, it’s almost impossible to send a message without it being flagged as SPAM. And furthermore, receiving messages on myspace is a major pain in the butt. You get a notice that there’s mail in your e-mail software (Outlook, Entourage…), and you have to stop whatever you’re doing to retrieve the message on this slow server.

Regarding MySpace for promotion, like I said, it did have it’s time. But now you can’t do anything without being considered a spammer. I feel like I’m in Kindergarten again! You can’t do this, you can’t do that…

I certainly have no agenda here, and don’t by default recommend other social networks (I’m sure they’re a pain in the butt too). I just thought it worth pointing out that ironically MySpace is NOT a good place to PROMOTE yourself. It is good as a free website. However, I would utilize other promotional tools (such as creating your own Blog outside the myspace network) and point it to your myspace site. Bottom line, you can reach a lot more people thru Yahoo, Google and MSN than thru myspace, and they’ll be a lot less frustrated when they actually do find you.

Hope you found this informative. If you did, please help support Independent Music at our Label’s website, Act2records.com. And check out our Mp3 Music Store. There’s a lot of great music and free downloads too!

All the best,

RAH

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