A couple of years ago and everyone who was anyone (or wanted to be anyone) had a MySpace page. We all logged in, posted comments, listened to new and interesting (and new and dreadful) music, tweaked our layouts, probably wrote our first ever blog, agonised for ages over who to list in the ”influences” section… It was all very jolly, like a glass of digital Pimm’s on a summers day on a proper British lawn - a pretty girl in a slightly see-through flowery dress is optional of course but no bloody children! These days you’re almost looked down upon if your band has a MySpace page - particularly if it’s your primary online portal. This change seemed to happen over a very short time. I know things fall out of fashion quickly but why should something so fundamentally useful and popular suddenly become the online equivalent of kissing your gran?
It doesn’t help that the nice people who run MySpace (Er… I think it’s that awful News Corp actually…) tried to turn it into a Facebook type site with lots of really badly implemented social networking stuff tacked on so that the whole site now looks and feels like a mentally deficient Giant Panda with Quality Street wrappers stuck to its stupid head. It also doesn’t help that the site quickly became overrun with boxes, windows, buttons, games, adverts targeted about as accurately as the BBC3 commissioning editor chooses new comedy shows and more layout choices than anyone without ADHD could shake a stick at.
Instead of trying to beat Facebook - which we all know is impossible because it’s run by the modern equivalent of the Catholic Church crossed with an advertising agency and a fascist regime - they should have thought the following:
“What do we do best? What do most of our users want? What is the one thing we’re known for in most circles?”
The answer used to be that they where great at offering bands and fans a place to post songs, blogs and messages to each other. You could easily upload a few pictures, see how many times your page and songs had been checked out, check to see if anyone had thanked you for the add… If you talked about MySpace to most people - even people so technically outdated they still think Ceefax is a bit whizzy - they would tell you about the Arctic Monkeys and the Lilly Allen’s of the world who had used the site to help generate interest in their tunes. Most people who signed up to MySpace (not counting the brief few months where teenage girls thought it might be a good thing to try before trundling off to the now also defunct Bebo to talk about how they’ve been going out with Kev for almost three weeks and was it time to let him finger her behind Boots at lunchtime?) went to look at the music stuff.
Instead of being content with that and expanding on the services that could be useful to a band or a fan, they decided to encourage painters, writers, film companies and, heaven forbid, the ruddy general public to get a MySpace page so they could all share their half-baked cack-handed attempts at artistry with the world. This diluted the concept more than that awful orange juice you get at church fetes. They quickly lost out to all the other music sites springing up offering more specific tools for artists and as we all know the number of sites that do this is gimungous, both in the extreme and to the max.
So now when you visit MySpace and look at somebody’s page, you will see that they haven’t logged in for months. You can almost hear the tumbleweeds blowing through their servers. Blogs sit crying by themselves in the corner. Links lie dead and scattered about like so many broken dreams. Videos are shot on Super8 and only subtitled in Polish. Songs are staring listlessly into the distance. You get the idea...
And you know what? I think it’s a shame. But it serves them right for being money grubbing little corporate whores. I wonder when people like this will figure out that you can’t expand and grow forever. It just isn’t physically possible - unless we are suddenly contacted by aliens who have a love for badly produced guitar bands. Those short-sighted morons that call themselves shareholders are only interested in ramming another Porsche in the garage and not in whether or not a service is useful and practical for the long term. They don’t even understand the long term. Most of them will be dead in a few years from some heart condition or other as a result of working like a cretin for their entire adult life - it’s not my fault you married an awful harridan and you can’t bear to be in the same room as your own children. As long as they can afford to have a bigger summer home than that bloody awful Fenlington-Smythe next door then who cares if MySpace disappears up its own bumhole? They can just move on and invest in and ruin the next big thing. And the people who have their companies invested in by these shareholder types quickly throw all their morals in the air faster than an Essex Girl at Mardi Gras.
I’m getting sidetracked… Anyway, RIP MySpace. You could have been fantastic. You briefly shone so brightly but of course we all know that, “he who shines twice as bright shines half as long… and you have shined so very very brightly Roy.”
And by Roy I mean MySpace. It’s possibly time for my meds.
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