MySpace is Dying
Over 3,000,000 bands are using MySpace to promote their music, and it seems that more and more of them are ditching or neglecting their own websites. But is relying on MySpace to further their career the best approach?
It's true that MySpace has over 130 million users and is the second most trafficked website, next to YouTube, attracting over 3% of the internet clicks. Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation isn't complaining while millions of teenagers generate his income. Murdoch owns over fifty news papers and magazines around the world, along with Fox News, 30 other cable/satellite channels, and a large share of DirecTV. Last year News Corp. purchased the popular community site and handed the MySpace boys $580,000,000 to cash in on their web traffic, hoping to add to the $24billion they made in 2005. After this deal was struck, Google spent $900,000,000 in advertisements on MySpace.
With the ease of updating and adding content, it's understandable why so many bands are relying solely on MySpace to promote their music. I guess that's fine if you don't mind having a website that uses web standards that are ten years behind. Each page has a comments section, which is nothing more than a glorified guest-book. Other MySpace members become friends and leave messages, usually amounting to phrases such as "Hey, I love your music!"… spamming the site to draw traffic to their page. How many times have you visited a band's MySpace page and found two different songs playing at the same time, as the media player kicks on and a music video starts up without waiting for the visitor to push play? Once the veneer of being "hip" is stripped, these annoying qualities become obvious.
The problem I foresee is that it won't be long before the MySpace bubble bursts. Since most of their users are teenagers, studies show that the masses will naturally migrate to the next big fad, similar to the way they change their circle of friends. Popularity of a website is measured on how long the average user stays on their site and MySpace has already reached its pinnacle, peaking at 2 hours and 25 minutes in October of 2005.
If artists spend more energy on their own websites, viewing MySpace as a supplemental marketing tool, in the same way PureVolume should be used, then the right approach is being taken. But when artists promote their MySpace page more than their own website, they're setting themselves up for trouble. Since the average MySpace user is a teenager, artists may find that their fan-base has either forgotten them or moved on to the next community site.
MySpace is dying, and three million artists will either realize the importance of having their own well developed website or they'll chase after the next trend, hoping to rebuild their fan-base. I'd rather focus my energies developing my own traffic than nursing off of a corporate monster.