The Trouble With MySpace.com

As MySpace.com continues to be the "it" music community online here in the mid-'00s, I remain a skeptic rather than a believer. I grudgingly visit--you kind of have to these days, if you're seeking free and legal music online--but I'm never all that happy about it.

Note that I judge the site solely as a resource for high-quality free and legal MP3s, and as such it leaves rather a lot to be desired.

To begin with there many more than 450,000 (!!) bands with music available here, which means that it is largely and inescapably an upload free-for-all, with absolutely no workable way to browse effectively. What we have instead is "dismediation" run rampant. I for one find it disconcerting, not to mention singularly unhelpful, to click on "top artists" and find myself on a page with three columns of suggestions: "Unsigned," "Indie," and "Major." And to see further that "top" in this case refers simply to some page-view-related number that is clearly being skewed by some of the bands themselves and their followers. It may be a kick for unsigned bands such as Hollywood Undead and Porcelain and the Tramps to see themselves listed on the same page as the likes of Justin Timberlake and My Chemical Romance, but I don't think it serves anyone else to have the musical landscape flattened and de-qualified this badly.

A second issue with MySpace is that, from my experience, the clear majority of the songs here are streams versus downloads. The site has solidified its own media player technology; each band page features the same player on which a maximum of four songs can be played. Any one of these songs may be available as a downloadable MP3, but most often they're not, particularly when dealing with major acts (Coldplay, Fiona Apple, etc.).

A third problem: the fact that the downloads are not reliably downloadable if you don't have a relatively new and powerful computer, and even then not always. The media player sometimes hangs up and won't load, for instance; or it loads but the MP3 does not download. So even when there is good music there it is not always accessible. For this reason alone I try not to feature MP3s that are available only on MySpace.

Finally, I'm just not happy with the way MySpace has funnelled attention away from individual sites with an individual look and feel. Many independent musicians have rushed off to MySpace at the expense of having, still, their own separate web page. (A disconcerting trend: having a URL for a home page that, when you click it, leads straight to the MySpace page.) Despite the modest amount of customization available for MySpace pages, they all are pretty much the same. In fact, the MySpacers who have managed to code themselves into a slightly different look usually end up with pages that are all but unintelligible, graphically speaking. But even the standard MySpace page, graphically speaking, is close to a nightmare. I'm not expecting web pages as works of art for hard-working, can't-be-bothered independent musicians, but I would be sorry to see MySpace become the default look and feel for up and coming artist web sites.

This all said, MySpace has grown over the past few years to become a place that musicians and bands feel compelled to be a part of, and my resistance to it, admittedly, has been worn down to some extent. After all, I've even ended up putting a page up there for Fingertips, which is known as "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."



updated 15 Nov 06