MySpace and music
(posted on 2007-10-16 09:49:41)
During the past couple of years MySpace has revolutionized indie music - not the music itself, but the way the scene organizes itself through interactions between bands, fans, labels and promoters. There is barely a band without a MySpace page now and it's normal for advertisements and back-announces to refer to a MySpace page for more information. When someone wants to contact a band to arrange a show or a release, they assume the band will have a MySpace account to send a message to. MySpace must have achieved close to 100% uptake in the indie subculture in a few years - a remarkable case of technology adoption. The case is ripe for research, though I haven't discovered many publications about it. I'd like to have a go myself one day - in the meantime here are some musings. Note that I'm not talking about general use of MySpace or other social networking sites - just use within this specific sub-culture.
To me what makes the MySpace revolution interesting is (a) the fact that it happened despite flaws in the product that are widely acknowledged, and (b) the eerie fit between certain features of the technology and the psychology of the scene it services.
The beauty of MySpace is that all the world's bands now have an easy-to-find web page and communication channel. Because of a well-timed postgrad stint in 1991 I got on the Internet early and like everyone else quickly realized how useful email and the web are for organizing projects, especially across geographical distances. When I did the Spill compilations in the early 90s there were one or two contributors on the net, but most of the interstate and international communication was by phone and, believe it or not, letter. I remember wishing that all bands were on the Internet, and now they are.
MySpace mixes together on one page several different functions that traditionally have been performed using separate applications:
- information about the band (some bands did this with a regular web site, and before that, people looked up the band up in a book)
- communication with the band (previously done by email, phone etc)
- an index of band contact details (was do-able with Google but before that quite hard - you can't look up a band in the White Pages)
- a representation of the band's social network (previously stored in people's heads, encoded in album credits etc)
Part of the weirdness of MySpace is this mix of several functions on one screen. Finding out information and sending a message are quite different activities and don't necessarily mix well. Everyone has a gripe about MySpace - here are my top three:
1. The pages are cluttered, with the kind of fugly design you used to see in the "blinking text" 90s. Everyone complains about this. How can such a popular site have such a bad interface? Why do users continue to accept it? Is it because they are young and didn't live through the design hell of the web's early days? Surely it would take the MySpace devs about two days to fix this - though some of the clutter is due to advertising, which I guess is not going to go away.
2. It's great that every band has a webpage now, but most of the content you see on a band's MySpace page isn't written by the band, or even about the band, but consists of links to and messages from other people. Most of these provide no useful information - they are add thank-yous, messages that don't make sense because they are half of a conversation, and gig spam unrelated to the band you are looking up. Most bands have information there but it is hidden amongst other people's dross.
3. The public friends-list feature began as an ugly competition to be linked to high status people, and has degenerated from there into complete meaninglessness now that most bands accept every friends-list request. MySpace's attempt to engender social anxiety with this feature is clumsy and feels like a bad parody of a school playground. MySpace exploits this anxiety to get users to spend more time at the site.
But despite its faults, MySpace has close to 100% penetration in the indie music scene. What interests me is the uncanny fit between the software and the scene. It's almost as though the former was designed for the latter. I won't bother with jokes about nerds socializing online, partly because not all indies are nerds and partly because someone who wants to socialize online could do it somewhere other than MySpace. I'll also ignore for the moment the fact that MySpace is owned by News, the wrongest media organization on the planet, as I'm not sure in my own mind what the implications of that are for the bands using the site. What I do want to argue is that the indie scene has some awkward problems which MySpace subtly exploits and accentuates.
1. Social balkanization .. Indie has always suffered from the fact that a given town has many seperate music scenes that exist like parallel universes whose inhabitants are unaware of each other. Many bands are legendary among their social group and unknown outside of it, and rather than change the world by preaching to a large audience, they play only to people they personally know. This is part of the charm of indie but it is subtly disempowering as well. It used to be that you'd look at a gig guide, find the bands you know you like, and go see them. That process tended to create stagnation and balkanization, but at least at the moment of reading the guide you were finding out about bands you didn't know, and potentially considering seeing them. But in the MySpace age people tend not to read a public gig guide: instead they subscribe to bands they already know and receive gig information directly from them. So the only people who find out that a band is playing are the people who are already into them. This catch-22 reinforces social fragmentation and reduces the likelihood of DIY music being a mass medium through which change can be effected. The upside of decentralizing the music media of course is that it's now harder for bad bands to dominate a scene by getting into bed with media people.
2. "My friends are cooler than your friends" .. This has always plagued indie, despite the fact that one might expect an alternative culture to rebel against heirarchies of this kind. Too many people at indie gigs try to be seen talking to whichever dude got a good review that week, went overseas, signed to a cool label or whatever. It's sad and self-defeating, and even the perpetrators don't really want to be doing it, but it's part of our culture. It would have been nice if the scene's online socializing tool worked against this cringeworthy tendency - instead, we got the friends-list.
reply 1 from Clinton: Nice post, Greg. Interesting that MySpazz has realised it is falling behind the 8-ball and is frantically Facebooking itself, copying various features. I personally despise how MySpace looks, but recognise I must deal with it if I want people to find me. I actually don't accept all friend requests by any means - I think your friends list reflects on you. There is probably an equation you can do where the size of your friends list is inversely proportionate to how many actual friends you have anyway. I actually use Facebook as a truly social network, whereas MySpace is a promotional tool to me. Others seem to do this, too.
reply 2 from Greg: Thanks for your comment Clinton. You know, the more I think about it, the more I'm starting to think that I just don't like friends-lists. I didn't like them in Friendster, in MySpace they have become silly, and I've resisted the lure to Facebook (and a guy in Sydney took my name anyway). I don't want to use a technology where I have to define whether someone is my friend or not. No-one older than primary school think that way, and it's quite nerdy when you think about it. In the real world people regard each other as anything from close friends to aquaintances, people vaguely known and so on. In other words there are shades of grey, not just a binary distinction between "friend" and "not friend". With email etc anyone can talk to anyone, I wonder whether unease with the clumsy friend thing underlies my gripe with social networking systems.
reply 3 from Greg: When I wrote the post I couldn't find many publications on social network sites, but the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication has just released a special issue on this topic.
reply 4 from Greg: ... and Cory Doctorow has published an article identifying problems with Facebook and arguing that it will follow Friendster and all the other social network sites to the internet graveyard
reply 5 from what's your name?: I wouldn't mind being on MySpace myself if they had an "enemies" list, instead of a "friends" list. I'd spend hours combing MySpace for people to hate and adding them as enemies. MySpace is true lowest common denominator appeal. People add themselves to it simply because everyone else does and thus it's become "popular" in a kind of ruthless peer-pressure way. It thus attracts a lot more media attention than other free website spaces (Tripod etc.), and therefore the public's attention. The "friends" list takes up the bulk of the individual pages, which is what makes them bulky, ugly and take so long to load. I don't use it, so I'm not sure if it's possible to not have the "friends" list; I've noticed at least one band's page has no such list. I do know of a few people who have been making their own music for years who support MySpace, however. Zan Hoffman has said he finds it a valuable networking tool, so it does depend on how it's used.
reply 6 from Andrew: Sorry, didn't put my name up last time. Ho hum.
reply 7 from ianw: firstly, it's easy on mySpace to choose, from your 257 total friends, the 'top friends' list displayed on your page (and whether this will be a top-4, 8, 16 etc) .. it seems to me that mySpace users (and I am one) interpret the 'friends-list' semi-intuitively (at a glance it's usually simply to guage who is, in real life, a friend/contact/musical-hero). ACB said (interestingly) the other night, considering it's origins in spammer-biz, the site may actually have become less evil when Newscorp bought it. The appeal to me has always been the ease of listening to music while online (initially, for me, because checking e-mails at Rmit, mp3s were blocked) and the friends-list is an integral part of this: once you are done hearing X, you just glance around and decide what's on next (um, as some of you know, I can barely listen to an entire song; albums and even compilations are only an option on random. I imagine I'm not alone here, if it a little extreme). Unfortunately the speed of machines + connections in some parts of the world mean some people have little frustration with the slowness of mySpace. The e-mail feature is a nightmare, actually deleting old 'sent' mail (my problem with e-mail in general is difficulty recalling if I've sent something or just composed it in my head) but it remains the only way to keep in touch with some people. Similarly to (above) the friends lists and bulletins tend to remind me of things I meant to ask people, or look up on their crappy myspace sites, in a random taking-a-walk-thru-mySpace kindof way. Facebook has comparable nightmare-features eg. the tendency for people to clutter their (and others') page/s with beside-the-point stuff, but then this clutter may function to remind people of random stuff? I've noticed some people seem to prefer Facebook to regualr e-mail, so began to notice the same, in regard to just a few people, the same in myself. This can be interesting (to wonder: what is it just because I need to see their face? etc) but ultimately, for reasons i said above, I prefer e-mail. I could go on: Mac Mail is useful to search for keywords in the body of an e-mail (and is awesome for delivering random lists of old e-mails as a result, reminding me of random stuff etc see above; but it seems to be unable to search for an e-mail address, so it's back to the online interface search for that. Zzzzz in my dreams the revolting look/feel of mySPace will inspire music websites everywhere to incorporate flash-players and front-page friend/links recommendations. No-one (including me) seems to be rushing into it though.
reply 8 from Ms .45: May I please make just one small pro-MySpace comment - for me, MySpace eliminates problems of balkanisation. I don't have a scene - it's not true to say I have no friends (no! It isn't!), but I have, say, one friend who's a goth, and one friend from a job I had three years ago who's a 50-year old church-goer and I don't know what music she listens to, and another friend who's pretty mainstream, and my sister listens to just about anything, and my ex-boyfriend likes Waits and Cohen... as you can see, I won't be getting any listening tips from them (or I'll be getting such a variety that it won't help me much). MySpace allows me to see a band listed in Beat or InPress, type their name into MySpace and instantly hear if I'll be wasting my limited funds or not. It's objective (the music is good or it is not) and it can remove the "does this fit in with my scene" factor because of this. I pay little or no attention to the "friends" list - my own "friends" list includes my cousin, John Weeks and a whole bunch of bands I like. I think you're reading way too much into the word "friends". (Whereas Facebook is a total wank, and although I use it, it's actually LESS useful for music fans.)
reply 9 from James Earthenware: Ms .45 has some good points, as I use it like a wiki to check if a band's review or gig guide description actually matches it's sound. It's also good for finding "lost" music because, browsing through "friends" of friends you find all sorts of amazing sounds. I think the paradox of myspace is that is uses very low resolution MP-3's, (96k?) so you can easily load and stream with the flash player, and this also provides security for bands because it's a pain to try and rip this stream, and even if you do it's low quality sound. I think myspace's success is built on the crappyness of it's MP-3 encoding, while it simultaneously defeats itself by allowing people to FILL entire pages with high resolution jpegs and video links that take forever to load. Facebook became popular I think because it found ways to limit spamming and didn't allow people to customise their pages, leaving a cleaner interface, but I really hate it because if you can't customise the page it is hard to make the page visually reflect the mood or attitude of the music. Usually if I "contact" someone via myspace, I will ask for/provide an email so I can contact them in an archival-friendly format. I think in this respect, myspace works like a filter, so you can distinguish spam, fans and friends, and maintain a distance from people you don't want to give your email to. It's just sad that the developers/users haven't done more to discourage spam, because I am near enough ready to give up on maintaining myspace. By the time you sort through all the trash-friend requests which are simply advertisements for really horrible bands pleading you to "check out my new song/fashion label/ studio) there's no time left for building or maintaining meaningful connections. Also, there's so many errors in the HTML code that will NEVER be fixed, especially now that people have migrated to facebook, and now are migrating from facebook to twitter. It's a pretty crap revolution really, you can get a robot program to generate you 100,000 friends, but still struggle to get 10 people to your gig because all those friends are overseas / underage. lol.
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