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March 12, 2006
Why I Just Keep On Lovin' MySpace When it Done Treat Me So Bad
I really don't like MySpace. In fact, I dislike almost everything about it. The design seems shoddy, the pages are badly organised, it can be really hard to find anything you're interested in, pages play unsolicited music and video at you, if you open 86 MySpace pages at once it crashes Safari, and, you know. So on.
However, it appears that we are rapidly approaching the point where every band in the entire world ever has a site on MySpace. Most of them stick new tracks on there too, either to listen to online or occasionally to download. Karine Polwart and Benji Kirkpatrick have full songs to download, different from those I've linked to in Potted Music (which incidentally I have updated again to add Croft No. Five). Jim Moray's makeup is channelling David Bowie, and Jon Boden has a track to download from his forthcoming electric solo album. Peatbog Fairies, who I was unable to find any downloads at all for when putting together the potted music page, have three tracks on MySpace for download. I clicked on a random pic of a user with a melodeon, and discovered it was Rees Wesson, who sold me my D/G Castagnari Studio a few weeks ago.
And so it goes. All the bands friend each other, so you can follow traces from the bands you like to all the other bands you like, and all the bands you probably ought to like, and the fans of all the same bands as you, and you're sure you recognise that woman from the festivals last summer, or who you saw at the folk club. Bands are the natural social networking contagion agent. Other networking sites create little circles of existing friends, and yes, they overlap. But with myspace, you link people together by the bands they like. Works for me.
Posted by Alison at March 12, 2006 06:49 PM