When I opened my music label Cloudshine Global Music, I did what the common wisdom dictates you should do: Get on MySpace and build up a fan base. As a 50+ baby boomer, I felt a little like Dorothy must have felt at her first glimpse of color after leaving black and white Kansas. But I tried to adapt and fit in with the locals.
For those of you who don’t know about MySpace except from those tabloid stories of crimes committed in cyberspace you always get on the news channels, its what the Internet journalists and others refer to as asocial networking site. MySpace is to socializing as eBay is to yard sales.
When I started the site for my music company, I was able to set it up as a music based site. MySpace seems to think that music = “band” and so its templates only allow you to categorize aspects of your endeavor in band terminology. “Band Members” is just one example. One of the more frustrating aspects of being categorized as a band is that users of MySpace have the option to reject all communication from bands, so when you try to “add” (in MySpace speak) one of those members who has the “no-band” filter on, you can’t.
My problem was that my company is a record label and publishing company. As such, we represent more than one artist, and many of them are not bands (is Norah Jones, or Sheryl Crowe, or Bob Dylan a “band”?) What one is supposed to do is to collect “friends” These friends will check out your page and leave comments. If you are a music site, they might listen to your music and you can even sell downloads. So, obviously, the more the merrier.
I tried to avoid the personal aspects of the networking experience by not using a picture of myself and naming the site for the company rather than me personally. I wrote blogs and comments using the royal “we” and when I did use my name, I tried to add my company as part of the name so that it was clear that I was speaking as a corporate entity rather than an individual.
At first, I avoided any underage members (17 was the cutoff) until I realized that age listings were unreliable and it was pointless to vet the members I invited to join my page. I started out by posting some music from our first release and then I proceeded to look around for potential fans by going to sites created to honor artists whom I considered similar to our label’s debut artist.
I invited as many as I could and started off bringing in more than a hundred fans per night. I then found that many of these posted comments and I thought it would be rude to ignore these, so I answered each and every one of them. After a few thousand “friends” I noticed that most of the ones who left comments were either musicians or writers or in some way involved in the music industry. In short, these “friends” were doing exactly what I was doing – they wanted me to listen to their music and comment on it. Also, as a record label, I was a prime target for unsigned acts who thought that I was going to turn them into superstars overnight.
Despite the enormous drain on my free time, I found myself spending hours each evening answering the comments, listening to the artists who requested my comments, and writing blogs that I strictly limited to music industry topics. In fact, I tried to talk about the album we wanted people to buy with as soft a sell as possible. I gave some critiques of some of the members’ music, but always in the most general and encouraging tone.
The site developed a following. At last count, we’re up to 3,500+ friends. This may sound like a lot, but it real isn’t. There are some pages with over 100 thousand friends and many in the tens of thousands range. Some of these numbers are achieved through the use of bots – Web crawlers that automatically go through the membership page by page looking for usable links. They can gather hundreds in a single evening.
MySpace provides a few methods to thwart these – one of the most common is the Captcha. You’ve seen these in other places. They are graphic representations of random letters and numbers which must be hand-entered into a field provided as ASCII text. Programs that look at Web pages are not generally sophisticated enough (yet) to interpret images and translate them into ASCII text, so the “add” request cannot be completed unless a real live person completes it. Users can also set their preferences so that they cannot have “add” requests filled unless the requestor knows their email address or last name.
In general, I have found that the people on MySpace I’ve encountered have been very gracious, tolerant, well mannered, and positive. There seems to be a rather sizable contingent of religious folks – people who wish you well and pray for you. Most of these tend to be in the older age groups.
I have found that from a sociological standpoint, people act in ways that indicate that they feel somewhat safe from actual physical contact. They will be suggestive or provocative and often engaging on their pages in ways I would suspect they are not in real life. It’s similar to the way some people drive: They tend to be more aggressive because the automobile they are driving affords them a certain amount of protection and anonymity they don’t possess in real life.
I have on a few occasions been asked by some “friends” to engage in philosophical discussions. I have been very tentative about this because I try to keep the site purely musical and true to its purpose as a music only site. I try never to go off topic. But out of 3,500 acquaintances, there are precious few who go the extra step to reveal anything about themselves that would allow a true friendship to develop.
But the online world can be a dangerous place and turning these protected relationships into real world ones can be risky, so I fully understand the reluctance to take such friendships beyond the superficial. And, in my experience, I have been using the MySpace purely as a way to expose our music to a wide audience with the least cost.
So, how has that gone? I would say that as a way to promote music, MySpace is very nearly useless unless you are willing to combine it with a strong program of radio airplay and live shows. To expect MySpace alone to generate online or real world sales is to court disappointment. And it is very time consuming. But, for those precious few with whom I have developed a more serious relationship (which I take offline and conduct in regular email when possible), I have started this BLOG.
What follows are some essays I wrote for another Blog and some other essays I wrote over the past few years. I intend to keep it up if I get some responses and since I am not selling anything (music or otherwise), I feel free to write about topics I would never consider on MySpace. I may even lose a friend or two who didn’t know my philosophical musings on certain controversial topics. One hopes that will be made up for by attracting new correspondents. I like that term better than MySpace’s “Friends”.
