"myspace" in Weblog

I’ve been on MySpace for a while now, basically because loads of my friends are, but I’ve barely used it in the last 2 months, apart from checking on a few bands. It’s just too much hassle. It’s hard to wade through the hundreds of peoples’ friends looking for bands I want to check out. It’s a hassle trawling through all the spam comments and ads for clubs/bands/whatever to see what my friends are doing. But all my friends are there…

I was invited to Facebook a month or so back by a mate and I registered, spent ten minutes filling in info and then forgot about it. But in the last week it feels like there might be a change a-comin’… I’ve had maybe half a dozen friends join and all of a sudden I’m logging in regularly. With Twitter-like status, photos, the activity feeds, stories, comment threading and an interesting selection of participation functionality Facebook have done a far better job of the social stuff. It’s an easier and more fun way to keep up with my friends.

The separation of my online social community from my music one seems right - the uses are quite distinct. A lot of people happen to use MySpace just to keep up with mates though, and I suspect things are about to correct… I think both sites would be the better for it too.

The London music scene seems to be on fire at the moment! I can’t remember a time when there were more gigs to go to… In the last 10 days I’ve seen:

• Crystal Castles
• Danny Rapscallion of The Rapscallions
• Cardboard Radio
• Rosemary
• A jam session at the Macbeth
• Miss Odd Kid
• Middleman
• Sportsday Megaphone
• Metronomy
• Scout Niblett
• Bonnie Prince Billy

One interesting thing I noticed while putting together this list is that it didn’t even occur to me to try and find the bands’ own websites… I went straight to MySpace. MySpace has become the de facto standard for music urls - no mean feat. A lot of things about MySpace annoy me but I can’t argue with how simple its made it for anyone and everyone to get themselves online.

Incidentally though - everyone should check out Metronomy. They’re absolutely ace!

The Netflix $1 million competition to improve their recommendation engine has reminded me of something I said to my brother in Virgin Megastore the other night… I’d wandered in to kill some time while waiting for him to turn up for a gig, which is something I used to do a lot. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in music stores over the years. Mostly little indies but the big boys often get stuff the little chaps don’t and the sales can be interesting. What struck me this time though is that I got bored very quickly. Now that never happens to me while shopping for music! So what’s changed?

I’ve always been into fairly niche music. My vinyl addiction (now kicked) had me in and out of the hip hop shops around Brighton, Birmingham and London listening to dozens of records and chatting to other people in the shops. I’d take my stack to the desk to pay and the guy behind the counter, who I bought from and chatted to every week, would have another stack set aside for me to check out. Recommendations and pounding the pavement.

Then I moved over to buying a lot of my records from the internet. I’d chat to my mate J, who worked in a record shop in Leicester, listen to all the samples on Juno, read the Picadilly Records newsletter and make my choices. Recommentations and elbow grease.

When I stopped buying records I moved back to CDs. Both Amazon and Play do a decent job of divining my taste from previous purchases but I’ve relied a lot on late night MTV2, XFM, talking to friends and reading ArtistDirect bios to find new stuff. Over the last couple of years I’ve definitely not bought as much music as I used to. Recommendations, but more passive on my part.

In the last few months though I’ve started using Last.fm, MySpace and the iTunes Store. Last.fm, via AudioScrobbler, does an absolutely incredible job of figuring out my taste. And if I’m in a slightly different mood I can always go to the radio section and type in a few artists to get something that is outside of my normal listening preference. I also love the social aspect to it. Not from an interaction point of view but as a way of getting my friends’ recommendations at my own leisure. Every week I’ll have a browse through my friends’ profiles and listen to anything I don’t recognise. It’s social proof in its rawest form - they’re actually listening to this stuff so they must like it. If I’m taken with a track I’ll either buy through Last.fm or head to iTunes for instant gratification. I own the tracks within 30 seconds.

I use MySpace the same way - it allows me to mine my friends’ recommendations. I’ve found some great stuff just wandering through profiles. If I like what I find I’ll either download songs direct from the band’s profile or search the iTunes Store.

All of a sudden I’m back buying music again. And lots of it. I’ve bought 108 songs from the iTunes Store in the last month and that doesn’t include the stuff I’ve got from Bleep and various other MP3 stores. Most importantly though, I’m absoluitely loving it.

I reckon that I’m a classic Long Tail consumer. Yes, I’m interested in some stuff from the head, but for the most part I’m niche. If you look at my consumer behaviour over the years I fit exactly the profile that recommendation engines are trying to cater to. And I have grown to expect that kind of service. Virgin just can’t compete. It doesn’t carry the music I want and it has no way of directing me to it even if it did. Even during sales their physical products aren’t much cheaper than Play or Amazon Marketplace and I can get instant access to my purchase from iTunes or Bleep if that’s what I want. So what can they offer me? Very, very little indeed.

MySpace has become incredibly popular in the last year. It now boasts somewhere over 55 million members with another 150,000 people signing up every day. That’s simply incredible. It’s approaching the population of Britain and growing 150 times faster! And it’s launched its first (as far as I know) number one act on this side of the pond, the Arctic Monkeys, as well as propelling Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to half a million sales in the first week of their album’s release. It’s getting to be more society than social…

Despite its success, everyone I know who’s signed up slates its design. Now, the web development community puts a very high value on great design but we’re obviously not getting the big picture… The site is built on a great idea. Wood for the trees. I read somewhere recently that if every entrepreneur stopped to make the right decisions then many of our farourite products wouldn’t exist. I’ve seen this first hand ar Wordtracker: Mike and Andy wrote the system in 3 months and got it out there. Since then they’ve been working hard to do things again, the right way, but it’s an incredibly long process. If they’d done it that way from the beginning they would never have been able to afford the time and the product woudn’t exist.

This reminds me of Peter Morville’s user experience diagram with the interlocking hexagons combining to make a useful application. The sucess of a website doesn’t depend comletely on any single thing. An acceptable design will satisfice if the end result is great. All those folks out there writing webapps on the Web 2.0 wave would do well to remember this. Start with that great idea that solves a real problem and people will come.