RIP MySpace.

It's been occuring to me that MySpace is dying a slow and painful death. Poor comatozed thing has been on life support for a while, with thousands of musicians' bots* all typing the same message to each other day after day. Is it time to pull the plug Tom?

Don't get me wrong. As far as independent music's growth on the internet, MySpace was the evolutionary equivalent of the opposable thumb. Then the inevitable happened. It was bought by media slut, Rupert Murdoch via Fox. Anyone who has watched Fox News within the last...well, ever....will have noticed its quality control department is hardly at Stradivarius' standards. An invasive onslaught of advertizing, constant spamming and hacking, and horrendous load times started turning MySpace in to the Times Square of the internet - lots of noise, flashy lights and really annoying.

Much like Times Square, we were suddenly surrounded by every rapper, singer-songwriter and hooker looking to make a name for themselves - including myself ;). It became too much, and as a promoter it was too easy to harrass people. *All you needed was some software (called a 'bot') like Spyder, and you could message & friend request up to 300 people a day.. you could even specify what location, age and gender you wanted to target. I know because I did this for months, and I apologize. It turned people off. But by this point it was too late - Facebook had arrived, and was doing MySpace's job so much better. YouTube, eHarmony, Spotify, Pandora & Twitter were rusty nails in the coffin.

With this said, it is still an industry standard for checking out bands because it's simple layout of shows and streaming music is very accesible.. though if I was Mark Zuckerberg I'd be thinking it's all for the taking.