(As we here at EAP are somewhat technologically challenged, it came as a surprise that every musician we had anything to do with this month in the MUSIC issue turns out to have a MySpace page. When we looked into it, we were told that we were desperately behind the times, as EVERY musician has a MySpace page, and has done for years. So for our own benefit, and the benefit of our tens of Luddite readers, musician Todd Stadtman explains to Tod…)
Tod: So what's with this MySpace thing? Every single musician suddenly has a MySpace page. It's like you guys all got sent a secret handbook and that was the first command: "Get a MySpace page." How did this happen?
Todd: Actually I think that MySpace is beginning to be eclipsed by Facebook these days — and, in any case, such networking sites are now only a small part of the personalized web of internet-based promotional tools that the average band maintains, which now includes band-dedicated YouTube channels, Flickr pages, blogs, etc. — but it is true that having that kind of internet presence has become a fact of life for musicians. This is because the internet is increasingly the place where the exchange of music between artists and their audiences takes place, and, in order to remain viable, that's where those artists need to live.
I'd say it's almost more important for bands to maintain a web-based existence than it is for them to maintain one out here in the smellyold analog world with the rest of us. I understand how, to the casual observer, this might seem to have happened all of a sudden, but it's actually something that's been taking place gradually over a number of years, starting with the first crude home-coded band websites to go up during the WWW's stone age.
Tod: Can this possibly be a sign of the centralization of corporate music somehow breaking up? Is this a sign that regionalism might be gaining strength? [Tod's note: I'm always hoping this, but somehow it never seems to pan out.]
Todd: Well, if you completely ignore the fact that MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, yes. The recording industry's stubborn inability to adapt to the download culture — along with their lack of success in having their lawyers simply sue the internet and all of its users out of existence — has opened the doors for other, more savvy internet entrepreneurs to make bank on the new generation of musicians seeking to promote themselves through alternative channels. This does offer musicians a lot more control over how they promotes themselves than they had under the old model, which is a definite plus, and, so far, without the gate-keeping that the record industry's narrow commercial considerations necessitated. This is an "anyone can play" situation,as evidenced by the fact that ninety-nine percent of the bands on MySpace, as in the real world, are pretty awful. But the payback for corporate owned sites like MySpace and YouTube is that each of these bands is in turn delivering their fans to those sites' advertisers, so it's far from something that's happening outside the corporate sphere.
As for whether all of this promotes regionalism, I'd have to say that, given that its orientation is toward global networking, the answer is no, unless you want to consider the internet itself a region. The idea of a site like MySpace, as hyped, is to give musicians, regardless of how obscure or geographically isolated they may be, the ability to reach out to potential fans in all corners of the world. If anything, it undermines the whole idea of the local "scene" and provides a go- around for the notion that you have to start from a hometown base — which, given how insular and self-limiting some of those hometown scenes can be, is not in all ways a bad thing.
Tod: Does being able to communicate what your music does on line, and connecting to others, without the intermediary of corporate gate keepers, does this free up musicians to be more creative, take more chances, breathe a little more freely? or am I just being too hopeful there?
Todd: Yes, I think it definitely does. As opposed to the days when the imperative for any band wanting to reach a wider audience was to "get signed," I think bands today, having more options, are at least potentially more free from the pressure to conform to whatever narrow definitions of marketability the record industry is setting at any given time. Whether most of them are taking advantage of that and really being true to their muse is another matter.
Tod: Any changes you've seen take place in your world since the coming of MySpace?
Todd: Yes, that I can now, within my own very modest scope of ambition, get my music heard by an appreciative audience without having to slog around the local club scene, and can instead sit on my ass at home and blog about obscure foreign genre films, which is what I'd much rather be doing.
Tod: What do you hate the most about MySpace?
Todd: That all of the advertising pop ups and animated banners tend to make my ancient computer crash within seconds of logging onto it.
Tod: What do you love the most about MySpace?
Todd: See answer to #4.
(Todd Stadtman is a musician and writer based in San Francisco's sunny
Mission District. Between writing about excruciatingly obscure, vintage
foreign genre movies for the site Teleport City and his blog Die,
Danger, Die, Die, Kill!, he's found time to record and release albums of
fussy pop music both under his own name and with the duo Zikzak. Under
his musical guise, he can be found on MySpace at
www.myspace.com/toddstadtman )