A Response to Maria's Blog

Maria's original blog can be found here.

MySpace and Web2.0 do seem like such an advantage to the struggling artist or band and indeed in some ways it is, but overall I’ve found that it is by no means the wondrous revolution that will wrest music from the hands of the multinational record companies just yet.

Last year I took a web production course as part of my media and communications degree. We were asked to produce an investigative website which we focused on MySpace and the way that artists were using it to their advantage, a similar focus to the article that Maria[1] looked at. We interviewed a bunch of bands and some industry folks like the Annandale’s promoter and Sony BMG Australia’s web director. From almost all the bands we interviewed we got the same response, that promoting yourself on MySpace gives an opportunity to get your music out there so that people can hear it but very few people will find out about a band because of their MySpace profile. The problem being similar to the problem facing bands in real life, it’s next to impossible to stand out from the thousands of other bands that are out there.

The industry folk who we spoke to also gave us a similar response, if they have been told about a band and are specifically looking for a demo of their music they will go to MySpace but neither had ever found out about a band purely from their web presence. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but the benefit of MySpace to fledgling bands has been grossly over exaggerated in the media.

[1] http://clovertherabbit.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html