I know it isn’t as big and well known as myspace but I think the fixagig members benefit more from that than they do from their myspace accounts. I think myspace has had it’s day and was popular because it was a new idea which, with the evolution of the web has become a rather pointless idea.

Apologies if this sounded like a plug for my own site but I thought this was a very relevant article to why I created it in the first place.

I just think it is a great place to talk to friends and bands. Just use other websites for other things. Like this one for your blog, much better than what Myspace has to offer. So just use this instead.

Discuss.

Their blog stuff is generally considered to be wank - it makes simple tasks a monumental effort.

I saw a lot of stuff about them claiming ownership of stuff in their terms - there was a lot of fuss in the webcomic world about it too.

But what do I know?

On the plus side however, imagine the horrors the people on there could unleash on sites otherwise. It keeps the teenagers busy, and in the case of most (not all) of them, they’re better off away from the general public.

Making yourself accessible as an artist is the single best thing you can do to get a web presence, regardless of the technology you use to achieve it.

But it is a really hard balance when it comes to something like MySpace. Having worked on t’other side, where fans can actually be very demanding, I can understand why many artists just give up on the whole web thing. I know that with Lisa, her inbox is filled with so many messages that it becomes almost a full time job just following up with MySpace. I cannot even fathom how the bigger artists manage it.

Billy Connolly delved in briefly, then I imagine he got overwhelmed by it all and deleted his profile. It does actually become really hard on somewhere like MySpace to engage with your fans when every fruitcake on the site messages you.

So, its sort of a double edged sword, where you want to engage with your fans, but the nature of MySpace, I would say, it is not a safe place to do it if you have a public profile.

Not only that, it is also a question of putting in time and what that payoff is. For me, I havent seen MySpace paying for the time we spend maintaining it, so anecdotally, that is my opinion. However, other bands (who are in the minority I might add) have success with it, so it really depends.

For indie artists, I do believe that there are other ways of doing things, but having a MySpace is a great way of getting your music heard. I particularly love the Perth music scene and will often just browse my friends’ friends’ for a listen. MySpace is EXCELLENT for this.

But I guess, like everything, when the teenagers infest it, it becomes harder and harder to manage

Personally, I think that having a song or 2 up on MySpace is a great idea, but making yourself accessible via there is asking for trouble, because people then come to expect it. I dunno, I guess in the online world, particularly with the younger folk, they don’t feel that there is any distance between them and their favourite musicians. Now, I don’t know, I do wonder if boundaries being broken down is a bit of a negative as well, where if you are even just a little bit in the public eye, all of a sudden you are indebted to people by virtue of having a MySpace profile! Its bizarre really. (I sound like an old fart longing for the days of ole, where we would write away with $10 in an envelope to a fan club!)

Especially seeing as our obsession with celebrities seems to be getting worse and more invasive… I dunno… there’s a lot of issues at play when it comes to how the entertainment industry meshes with the internet.

The key is to be as accessible as possible, though as the article points out, communing with your audience is a fine line between them ignoring you (you’re too small) or you ignoring them (you’re too big, or too busy).