The list reads like a fifth grade teacher’s nightmare.
Kurl!: “You Know? You Guys Won’t Just Be Famous Someday…You Will Rule The Fricken WORLD…of Music!!!!! I made this for you ..sorry it is kind of small, i can message you the bigger version if you like! I LOVE YOU GUYS!!! ALL THE WAY FROM COLORADO!.”
Only Allie <3: “i think your picture was taken at roller kingdom. thats pretty cool, if im right. i live like 5 minutes from there. i <3 your music.”
<3 I’ll Catch You <3: “Hi!!! thanks for the add!!! happy holidays!”
These are comments left by friends of the band My Farewell Letter, a Hudson, Mass. band who own a page on MySpace, the popular worldwide networking site. For any young artist or band, making new fans is always an important and fun experience.
And thanks to sites like MySpace, My Farwell Letter can make “friends” much easier. How easy?
“When we’re on tour, to make 8,000 friends would take a long time,” says My Farwell Letter’s lead guitarist Matt Kelley.
Currently My Farewell Letter has 8,129 MySpace friends, and counting. In fact, they will surely have more by the time you read this sentence. It’s true, independent artists and bands would find difficulty in making even 100 friends on the road after 6 months. But thanks to MySpace and other networking sites, these bands are finding it as easy as clicking the button “send message” to make thousands of fans.
ALL THE YOUNG DUDES
“Right now I would say MySpace has been a bigger help than anything,” says John Keefe, drummer for Boys Like Girls, a Boston-based band with 9,385 MySpace friends, including Death Cab For Cutie and Jimmy Eat World.
Boys Like Girls is currently on a tour sponsored by Purevolume.net, a website designed solely for artists, bands and their listeners. While Keefe thanks Purevolume for giving his band the opportunity to tour the east coast, he says MySpace has broader capabilities that allow for greater exposure.
“[Purevolume] is more about bands putting their stuff up,” Keefe says. “MySpace is more of a broader thing. It’s more about connecting with the fans.
“Kids get to know us. When I listen to a band, I want to know the dudes in the band. I want to know their influences and stuff.”
MySpace lets users do just that.
WE’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE
Launched in January 2004 and created by CEO Chris DeWolfe and President Tom Anderson – the Tom who friends everyone upon signup – MySpace began as a friend-networking website, but has blossomed into a hub for musicians and their fans, according to statistics provided by MySpace public relations official Jennifer Weaver.
With more than 64 million users, MySpace is the second-most viewed website on the internet, following Yahoo!. It is also a home to more than a million artists and bands. According to the statistics, it premiered The Darkness’ album One Way Ticket to Hell … And Back and its title-track single. It premiered the Black Eyed Peas Monkey Business with a weeklong launch in May and June, 2005. It released five of Madonna’s “confessions” from her new album Confessions From a Dance Floor.
And it also allows Local Indie Band X to market itself.
“At MySpace you can send out 100 friend requests to people who would never attend your show in the first place” says Kelley of My Farewell Letter. “People that don’t really listen to local bands would maybe like your music and come to your show. You get a lot of exposure that way.”
MySpace also connects Local Indie Band X with Local Indie Bands Y and Z, and it’s much easier than through touring. According to Kelley, My Farewell Letter thanks MySpace for recent shows at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston and the Middle East in Cambridge.
“The best part about MySpace is when bands friend other bands; getting shows – that’s the best way to get exposure,” Kelley says. “We get messages everyday from different bands on MySpace because they need a show.”
Because bands connect with other bands through MySpace, a long-standing tradition of connecting through live shows has been thrown completely out the window. Artists and bands that once relied on live shows to meet other bands and make new fans now find it more important to market yourself well on your band’s profile page.
“Word of mouth was important,” Kelley says. “But now it’s more like finding a band online and you can message them that way instead of going through kids and getting kids’ numbers.
“If you’re on tour and you need a show when you’re in Wichita, Kansas, you can just look up a band from Wichita, Kansas.”
THE EMO-LUTION
In the MySpace world, which could practically include LiveJournal – one of the world’s leading websites for journals, blogs and diaries – the most narrow-minded of people could likely group users into a few general categories with basic musical interests: namely emo and pop-punk.
MySpace has become the hub for all emo and pop-punk fans. Both genres – the former taking after Sunny Day Real Estate and Dashboard Confessional, and the latter pinned on bands with a sound equaling bands such as Blink-182 and the Get Up Kids – are the fastest-growing genres in music, according to musicians.
“The whole emo thing is like an ’80s hair band thing all over again,” says Keefe of Boys Love Girls. “Originally, from what I remember, when I first saw kids on there it was about, kids from LiveJournal have their own little MySpace and it kinda took off.”
MySpace statistics are examples enough. Every time a user plays a band’s song, a “play” is recorded in the band’s statistics. To compare, My Farewell Letter has more than 31 thousand plays – a good number for an indie band. Mainstream darlings Fall Out Boy has more than a million.
“They’re like the big standard. They’ve helped a lot of pop-punk bands,” Kelley says. “After Blink-182 and New Found Glory became popular there was no other bands playing that music until them.”
While emo and pop-punk make a sterling run into mainstream acceptance, some others find discomfort in both these bands and MySpace’s success.
“Emo has been out of fashion for about 4-5 years. Hate to inform everyone” says one user on the Anti-MySpace forums, a website for those against MySpace to vent their frustrations over the popular website. “I’d say the official end was when Modest Mouse signed to a major label. Or maybe when Elliott Smith … signed to Dreamworks, even though Dreamworks is pretty ok for a major. Most are now simply riding the wave.”
While MySpace’s opponents will generally point and laugh at emo and pop-punk culture, both the website and the cultures remain quite popular.
“It’s not that popular in the mainstream,” Kelley says, before retracting. “I guess it’s getting like that now with Panic! at the Disco and Fall Out Boy getting on TV more.”
RABBLE ON
Musicians weren’t the only ones noticing the emo and pop-punk revolution.
“We watched the trend of emo getting very popular,” says Derrick Oien, president and CEO of Intercasting Corp. “A lot of what we’ve done is the music.”
“A lot of what we’ve done” includes Rabble, an Intercasting creation that allows users to combine networking and blogging through their cell phones.
“It’s sort of mobile blogging meets social networking,” Oien says. “Everyone has a channel … everyone can have multiple channels.”
Rabble, which is already compatible with Verizon, Cingular and MetroPCS, gives users the option of controlling their own channels. In your channel, you can post blogs, photos, favorite places and notable events, among other things. But Rabble doesn’t want to shun the internet altogether, it just wants to bring parts of the web, the media, to the mobile world.
“The successful companies are the ones who make a useful space,” Oien says. “We talk about media because we think it’s important. I would argue that 10 million kids blogging on LiveJournal, that’s media.”
Rabble, which has partnered with LiveJournal and Blogger for blogging capabilities, wants to focus hard on uniting musicians and music fans.
And with this focus, you don’t need to look any further than Oien himself.
“When I was at mp3.com we watched bands come in every single day. Two- to three- hundred bands signed up every single day. There was a huge culture movement, and we saw bands get popular on mp3.com that were not getting distribution through retail.”
That was four years ago, according to Oien. Now, as one of the masterminds behind Rabble, he says his product can only benefit those indie bands.
“They need distribution” Oien says. “They’ll never be able to send a ringtone from an indie rock band. But because of Rabble … there’s no way why you can’t allow it.”
Today, bands can connect with fans with greater ease. They can talk about life, not just music. Bands can connect with other bands and market themselves without much struggle. But Rabble is the next step in the music and internet partnership. Soon, fans and bands will both find connections anytime, anywhere.
“I think when people look at it, users use the application and after five minutes it’s like, ‘Oh, this is a mobile version of MySpace.'”
And the evolution continues.