Oddly enough just a little while after posting my article about using advertisements to pay for music on this site I came across this while trying to figure out how to download songs on that damn new myspace music player (it seems you can’t anymore). Looks like the majors are trying to screw the indies again, and myspace plans on helping them. Like I was saying before, if we had ads on the site it wouldn’t be nearly as bad knowing that you’re helping support the band by visiting the site and referring friends which would result in more ad clicks to help us pay for our musical expenditures. Well it looks like the Majors plan on doing this and more through myspace and completely excluding the unsigned and indie artist from joining their little circle. As the article states this is going to make myspace turn into what MTV is now, nothing worth spending any time on anymore. What’s really sad is that most people probably wont even know, or even care for that matter. It’s kind of unfortunate that myspace had to become the popular one. Sites like reverbnation, last.fm, and Earn It Yourself are much better for bands than myspace is anyway.
UPDATE: last.fm kinda just screwed over independent artists, they only allow people from the US, England, and Germany to listen songs for free now. Anyone from any other countries (Canada, Mexico, South America, etc.) have to pay a membership fee now which really sucks because our play count was actually quite high on list.fm, but since they did this our play count now is practically nil. So they fucked over their users because they can’t try to find cool indie artists to listen to anymore, and they fucked over indie artists because they don’t get exposure to anyone from those countries anymore.
Reverbnation actually shares their ad revenue with the artists (I think it’s 50%) plus provides a ton of tools to help artists with promotion and stuff. Last.fm pays artist royalties whenever anyone listens to their song on their website and internet radio. While Earn It Yourself encourages bands to take the DIY approach, helps find and trade gigs, and provides a number of articles that would be useful to any musician. It’s really sucks that myspace is turning out this way, since the whole reason I liked it when I first found out about it was the fact that I could look up local underground music in my area easily. It’s the reason I know of and listen to all the bands listed in our links section. I never gave a shit for the social networking aspect of it all, but the fact that I could look up bands in my area and listen to their songs to see if I liked them, then see if they were playing any shows in the my area that I could go to was just too cool.
Though this shouldn’t be too surprising, myspace never seemed to show any interest in indie bands at all anyway. Take a look at the reverbnation site, they have a little section on the front page showing local artist in your area to check out. When was the last time you remember myspace putting a little thing on their front page like that for local indie musicians? Yep, that’s what I thought, never. Though I remember seeing all kinds of crap about major label musicians that I could care less for. Oh well, I’ve always found myspace quite limiting anyway, which is the reason I created this site in the first place. Hopefully anyone who stumbles across our myspace page and likes our music will also click the links to this website that I put on it. I’m thinking that myspace should only be used as a promotional tool for us indie musicians if this is the way things are going to be. If myspace and the majors don’t wanna share then screw ‘em, I’ll tell our fans to come here for updates instead of myspace.