Classic myspace bulletin 24: Outcomes for myspace (2005)

READING ON OUTCOMES FOR MYSPACE
What will eventually happen to MySpace? The same thing that happens to all breakthrough ideas that become absorbed by corporate culture. Did you see the announcements about the new MySpace Records and its first CD, a compilation they call rock? Now let's be fair, the selection is no worse than any other pile of soul-less over produced corporate crap. In fact, it's a shade better, a little spunkier.

Is this sour grapes? I hate corporate compilations. All they are is mix tapes without the integrity. But I do wish the comp was more like MySpace.

What's great about MySpace is that it's a world in miniature at your fingertips. One minute you run into hip hop, the next black metal, and then something so underground you can't figure out how to categorize it. But what did MySpace Records do? The same thing any corporation with a corporate IQ would do, they wanted to maximize potential sales by marketing to a niche and they didn't want to turn that niche off by including content they might not like. Just like corporate radio. Yawn. What a bore.

Look at the way they marketed it. You get to put extra pictures up if you buy it! Oh boy! Hey I got an idea, MySpace, before exploiting your membership and the artists you probably won't pay a cent to for being on the compilation why don't you spend those time and money resources on making the site function smoothly? It's lots of fun refreshing the browser a hundred times a day so you can hear a song or add a friend.

What happens next? Probably the same thing that happened to MP3.com. As MySpace rolls out its record company, it's movie production group, it's television development partnerships, what was once a thriving community of individuals will turn into a marketing machine for the big corporations.

Did you know that people get paid to research YOUR profile? Corporations would normally have to pay huge amounts of money and risk accusations of privacy invasion to get the info about the likes and dislikes of age groups and regions that hangs like ripe fruit on the trees of our profiles. But all they are doing is looking in a mirror; unless they seek what chaos theorists call noise, the smaller movements on the outskirts that wind up turning over the whole system. Mammals in the world of the dinosaurs.

My guess is as margins are squeezed and budgets are drained what will happen is what always happens, the site will become too obviously devoted to the promotion of corporate product and somebody else will come along with a wrinkle on the same idea and first the few will be there looking down their noses at the rest of us still on MySpace, then the mass stampede will occur. Seen the Simpsons and Family Guy on MySpace recently? Murdoch owns Fox and now MySpace. Expect lots of cross promotions.

I say this all the time. There is no way around the crapiness of corporate culture. Everything that is great about art and music is the opposite of corporate culture. Corporations are parasites that have grown so huge they have all but killed their hosts.

When you hear little bits of great rock songs that once heralded revolution matched to images of SUVs and balding men smiling confidently it's like glimpsing inside a huge parasite and seeing decayed bits of what it destroyed floating around in its guts.

Our culture is dying for two things right now. First, we need artists, writers and musicians who are absolutely against the grain and don't give a shit. We're out here. There's more of us than you think and the future of what you love about art and music is with us. But we need you.

We need a new audience. An audience that is eager for the real shit. An audience that will passionately support and communicate the real shit. You ever see people's lists of favorite bands and think holy fuck these bands are all dead. It really touches me when I see it in riot grrrl groups. List your favorite bands. Almost every name is a band that is no more, that stopped existing ten years ago. The OG riot grrrls would have had none of that. They wanted their own bands, bands right now.

Make your own bands. Be a prospector and hunt for gold in the wasteland out here. Don't just passively lay back and accept the corporate dildo. Real art and music can change lives.