Myspace, more hits than Google...

[MIKE BURN]

www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/myspace_pr.html



Who needs major labels, marketing, or airplay? A social networking site is getting more hits than Google -- and turning invisible bands into mini entertainment networks. How MySpace became the MTV for the Net generation.

By Jeff Howe



The members of Hawthorne Heights have no business being rock stars. They play a strain of punk that has consigned innumerable bands to the obscurity of dive bars and pirate radio. For the past three decades, a devotion to this stripped-down, anticommercial music has meant never quitting your day job.



And yet here they are on a dusty summer day in Pomona, California, playing for thousands of adoring fans. Hawthorne Heights is a big draw at this year's Warped Tour, a movable punk feast featuring more than 300 bands on 48 North American stops. The kids in the audience - a multiracial mix of teens from across Southern California - appear transported, pushing toward the front of the stage where slam dancers crash against each other like pinballs. Those in the front rows chant the lyrics with red-faced intensity. They've memorized the entire set.



Hawthorne Heights is touring the country in a plush bus. The quintet's debut album, The Silence in Black and White, has sold more than 500,000 copies since its release last year, and the group has appeared on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live and been on MTV's TRL. The five young men from Dayton, Ohio, are living the rock-and-roll dream - but they took a highly unconventional path to get there. The band achieved its popularity without any real radio or TV airplay, a feat unheard-of a few years ago. They aren't signed to a major label, and they don't want to be. They don't need industrial-strength marketing campaigns or heavy rotation.



What they have is MySpace, a community Web site that converts electronic word of mouth into the hottest marketing strategy since the advent of MTV. Massively popular, MySpace is nominally a social networking site like Friendster, but nearly 400,000 of the site's roughly 30 million user pages belong to bands. The rest belong mostly to teens and twentysomethings who attend the groups' shows, download their songs, read their blogs, send them fan mail, and enthusiastically spread the word.



As it happens, the man behind this phenomenon is working his way through the Warped Tour crowd like a rock star himself. Everyone seems to know Tom Anderson. A laid-back 29-year-old in a plaid shirt and baseball hat, he can hardly take three paces before he's asked to autograph a shoe, a T-shirt, or in one case a naked back. No wonder: His photo shows up at the top of every MySpace user's "friends" list. As the first friend of every MySpace member, Anderson may be one of the most popular humans on the planet.



And in the entertainment universe that MySpace is helping to create, friends count. "This generation is growing up without having ever watched programmed media," says Courtney Holt, head of new media and strategic marketing at Interscope, one of the first labels to embrace MySpace. "They don't think in terms of the album, and they don't think in terms of a TV schedule. They think in terms of TiVo, P2P, AOL, and of course MySpace. We're just going to have to adapt."



By any measure, MySpace is one of the top sites on the Web. It racked up 9.4 billion pageviews in August - more than Google - and new users are signing up at a stunning rate of 3.5 million a month. But these aren't the only numbers that drew the attention of Rupert Murdoch, chair and CEO of News Corp., which agreed to buy MySpace's parent company in July for $580 million: The site hosts 12 percent of all ads on the Web, more than any other site. MySpace should gross $30 million to $40 million this year, says John Tinker, an analyst with ThinkEquity in New York. And with News Corp.'s sales force behind it, he estimates the company could double that figure in 2006.



To focus on corporate finances, though, is to miss a larger point. The real economic beneficiaries of MySpace are the ambitious young musicians in Pomona and around the country who are creating a new, life-size kind of stardom. Over the past couple years, MySpace and other community sites, like purevolume.com, have launched a number of acts: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Relient K, and Silverstein, among others. Relient K, which plays earnest pop punk with an understated Christian message, has sold more than 500,000 albums in 12 months. My Chemical Romance's last album sold more than 1 million copies.



These artists have discovered what could be the first serious business model for music in the post-Napster era. The old way of doing things, which counted on a few blockbusters to finance dozens of expensive failures, is yielding little besides a decline in major label revenue. By contrast, "MySpace bands," as the site's publicist refers to them, keep production and promotion costs as low as possible. They give away their best two or three songs as downloads or streams and use social networking and email blasts to reach an audience hungry for new music. Converts become zealots, more than making up for any lost CD revenue through sales of concert tickets, T-shirts, messenger bags, hoodies, posters, and bumper stickers. With little fanfare, these groups are creating a new middle class of popular music: acts that can make a full-time living selling only a modest number of discs, on the order of 50,000 to 500,000 per release.



For this generation of musicians, the mass market and the hit-making apparatus it supports are relics of a bygone age. The new reality is that their audience isn't listening to radio or vegging out in front of MTV. The audience is online.



Tom Anderson wasn't much interested in the Web when he graduated from UC Berkeley in 1997 with a double major in English and rhetoric. He moved to San Francisco and started an alternative rock band called Swank. It barely lasted a year, and hardly anyone noticed when it broke up. Still, the experience left a deep mark on Anderson. There was a stark division between rock haves and have-nots. Bands were either on magazine covers and all over the radio or completely invisible. "I saw how hard it was for even really talented bands to reach an audience," he says. At the time he was standing right in the middle of the dotcom boom. Like a lot of people, he thought the Internet could change the way bands connected with their fans. "I just didn't know how," he says.

MIKE
mikeburn and friends

[bbchris]

great article Mike. I use google more than myspace



However I've now decided to make myspace page for everyone of my bands and also for Underground - hahahahahahahahahhaa

|Blah Blah|Thinking Out Loud|Jane Eliz||Talk Soup | Underground HK |

[MIKE BURN]

So let's see all your MySpace URL's then!



Here are mine:



www.myspace.com/mikeburn



www.myspace.com/mbaf

MIKE
mikeburn and friends

[ianbal]

I guess I should get round to linking to people, I created one months ago..............



If 6 was 9





Regards







Ian

[yidneth]

mine is at



myspace.com/priscillahernandez



and i think it's jsut another fashion or something, i mean, what's the criteria, i like the idea, but the truth is that there is people spending the whole day just to gather more friends in there, people that most likely jsut want to add a number in the friends list. thus i don't know what to think. For me it's a free place of promo and that's all, and i certainly use google more than my space LOL

[dj spaceAce]

mine is @ www.myspace.com/djspaceace

dj spaceAce aka Y-Orbit

Edited by: dj spaceAce  at: 12/4/05 13:19

[bbchris]

Woooooooooohooooooooooo!!

|Blah Blah|Thinking Out Loud|Jane Eliz||Talk Soup | Underground HK |

[throckmorton77]

Yeah, you can waste days and days on that site and only get like one person to come out to a show....but damn it if its not cool to get some one to come out or buy a cd becasue of myspace



www.myspace.com/johnhickeyband

Edited by: throckmorton77 at: 12/8/05 23:00

[MIKE BURN]

Thanks to all lovely people for the MySpace add's! ))))))))))))))





throckmorton77



Thanks for the add too! HAHA



Your groovy band sound and guitar playing is very cool!!!

MIKE
mikeburn and friends

[ONOFFON]

Hey Mike - great article - thanks for posting it.



ONOFFON is nearing 1,000 friends over there, for what it's worth.



We're all invisible bands until they figure out how to find us.







Cheers!