Is the party over for MySpace? Is the exodus beginning? Has Facebook killed it off? Maybe.
MySpace hasn’t been ‘cool’ for a while now. Not that long ago, though, it was the place to be to make friends and keep in touch with them.
I started a MySpace account when I was doing my podcast. As a way to find and keep in touch with musicians, it was without equal. Show dates, band info, it was all there at your fingertips.
There were other places for musicians, but with it’s popularity and ability to showcase songs in a way that made them easy to play, but hard to download, unless you wanted them to be, it was a dream come true.
Every band, no matter how big or small, had a MySpace page.
But gradually, bands have been trying other things. Twitter. Facebook. Sonicbids. Reverbnation. Pretty soon MySpace was just one in the list of obligatory links every band shared.
Today, I logged into my account on MySpace and checked my mail. Out of 22 messages, all from bands, eight of them said “This profile no longer exists.”
Some of these were bands I knew well and get regular emails from. One I know I am friends with on Facebook, is working on a new album in the studio and is promoting their music aggressively. Has MySpace become that irrelevant, that this band has given up one it?
I know I don’t check it often, but these were the latest messages on MS I had. It looks like either an exodus from MySpace has begun, or MySpace picked now to clean house and kill off a lot of accounts.
If that’s the way it’s going to be, they might as well close shop and let Facebook win.
Hey Al,
I believe the “This Profile No Longer Exists” thing is a new automated anti-spam measure. I read in a post in the MS help forum that one such band was told they had too many people mark their Myspace message as Junk. And to be taken off the “This Profile No Longer Exists” status… they had to contact their MS friends and ask them to go into their junk boxes and remove the junk status from the previously sent message.
Between that crap, banning ALL HTML in comments and the debacle that was their new improved profiles… Myspace is committing suicide. It has nothing to do with Facebook beating them out… they are doing all of this to them selves.
As a band with 85000 friends… I’m irritated that I’m losing a strong and powerful marketing medium. People are being driven out of MS. It really bites to have put so much effort into building a good presence to have it hosed by idiots.
ED
I’m pretty sure I cancelled my MySpace account. But I don’t care enough to go check it.
It wasn’t so much that it wasn’t “cool” anymore. It got downright annoying. MySpace was the place for bands. Then the place for friends. Then the place for spam. Then the place I wasn’t.