Blog by Sean McManus

WhoseSpace is this?

26 March 2006

Last night I saw The Starts supporting Tom Hingley's pre-Inspirals revival Too Much Texas. A great night, and since both bands are on MySpace, I was inspired to check it out again. Song and dance man Tim Ten Yen also has a page there, as do My Life Story and ExileInside. By setting up an account, I can join their communities and make it easy for me to find all their pages in one place.

This is not the first time I've considered joining MySpace. About a month ago, I went to their website, clicked 'join up' and found that the site's terms and conditions were broken. I notified the site through the contact forms, but I find that today, it's still missing (tested using Opera and IE).

What can we learn from this? Any of the following might be true:

MySpace doesn't monitor its sign-ups so it doesn't know the devastating effect this is having on new memberships.
MySpace does monitor its sign-ups but hasn't seen a significant drop in people signing up, even though they don't know what they're signing up to.
People don't even click the link to terms and conditions or don't care if they're absent. Even if they are posting their own recordings, email address and date of birth.
MySpace doesn't listen to visitor feedback about essential site maintenance, or does not care that people cannot see the contract they are signing.

Unless you know what you're signing up to, you're better off choosing somewhere else to host your music. I don't know how much additional traffic the MySpace effect generates, but I'm guessing that as before most bands get lost on there and the only effective promotion is the work they do themselves to attract listeners.

If anyone wants to tell me about their experience using MySpace to promote music, I'd be interested in hearing from you.

I have today updated my list of places to promote your music. You can still read my 15 top music promotion tips and my article about how to choose where to host your music.

Labels: customer service, music, music promotion