Eliethel's Blog

Is MySpace Dead?

// November 5th, 2009 // Blogging

I just read an interesting article here. It enforced my own thoughts and fears about the once very popular social networking website, that used to give equal chance to all to have a voice. Especially good for musicians like myself that couldn’t afford or didn’t know how to setup their own website and promote their work. It was good at the beginning. A great idea. Or was it just a trend? I quote from the site I mention above:

“Posters on the wall, teen magazines, boom boxes playing the same stupid songs over and over again (automatically!) – that’s not a sustainable situation, by definition. That’s teenage living and that’s what MySpace built its huge site on. Just like being a teenager, MySpace is something that most people grow out of.”

Some argue that it’s the musicians fault. They ruined it for everyone. For normal people (mark ‘normal’ as opposed to ‘artists’ ) that joined the community to meet new people and actually make friends, as well as for themselves. Nope, make that as bad as for themselves. Posting huge pictures of their gigs, or cover artwork or whatever. Spamming invitations to everyone and their mother, without even spending a few moments reading each persons profile. Do even bands who add other bands even listen to their music any more? Sometimes I wonder. People who actually do and leave a polite or interesting, or at least a take-it-under-consideration kind of comment are very rare these days. Too many bands, and too many songs, waaaaay too many friends and people to add and so little time for all of this, for anyone to even care if there’s a real band on the other side of these beautiful templates and endless lines of (most of the time) useless comments.

So, social networking is changing. People turn to other places like Twitter and Facebook, and now even bands do, thanks to the tools provided to them by sources such as ReverbNation. If MySpace wants to survive this they should at least take advantage of this new trend: The fact that if you have something to say, and if you want to be found, you must be everywhere. Many sites have incorporated the communication-between-social-networks thing, where you post on one place and everything gets updated. (Personally I find netvibes, atistdata and ReverbNation to be the best on this). One should really enter data once. But all places should give you the ability to do that. So let’s suppose you’re on your myspace page and, while browsing for new stuff, you finally come across something nice and you want to post it. Everywhere. Why should you leave MySpace to be able to do this?

MySpace is not dead. Far from it. It’s still a large community and so many people use it. I still have some friends who refuse to try any other platform. I think we have reached the point of multi-networking, of a serious need to be everywhere and do everything. And don’t take me wrong. I am a huge fan of diversity and pluralism, but I’m starting to miss simplicity and authenticity. Oh, well… I guess I’ll just utilize multi-posting until the next best thing comes along. I just hope we want lose ourselves in the process.

Still waiting for the next best thing