Happy 'Quit MySpace' Day

This is a great article about an incredibly unrealised music platform site run by possibly the biggest bunch of idiots on the Internet.

MySpace clearly don’t get it.

They think that they’re still in the social network game. That they are somehow competing with Facebook. They’re not. That’s not the business they’re in. I mean really - do you know ANYONE who uses MySpace for day to day general social networking? They may have been pioneers in this field (I don’t happen to think they were… but they MAY have been) - but that’s not what people use them for now.

Don’t get me wrong: You CAN manage your day to day independent music career using MySpace. Many people do. But it’s like drying your hair with a toaster. Possible, but not really fit for purpose.

Let’s be clear. We decided what MySpace would become. They set up a social networking platform, but what we as users decided to use it for is as a musicplatform. Were it not for issues of timing and some core functionality that nobody else was offering right up front, it would probably have been dead by now, because they still haven’t realised that very simple fact.

The only thing keeping MySpace on life support to this day, as far as traffic is concerned - is YOUR music. For reasons of critical mass alone, more or less every artist on earth has a presence there - and that’s mostly because every other artist on earth does.

And we put up with its broken interface, bad design, 90s technology, ad-riddled BS, and complete lack of comprehension about what MySpace is really for - for one reason alone: nobody else has EVERY FRICKIN’ BAND ON THE PLANET.

Right now, nobody else can do what MySpace could do, should they choose to. Nobody else has everyone in music signed up, and it seems unlikely at this point that anyone else ever will again. Lots of stuff does things far better than MySpace - but everyone’s already AT MySpace. Inertia rules.

Read on.