I joined the MySpace bandwagon well after the wheels started falling off – my personal musician account launched in July, 2009. Granted, the Sampson-Carroll (Embracing the Glass) page goes back to 2006, but it wasn’t my idea and I didn’t get actively involved with it until sometime last year. My hesitancy came from a few areas: my (at the time) complete unease with social media; my lack of understanding what MySpace could “do” for me; my gut-level aversion to advertising being thrown in my face for products I can’t relate to.

But I joined because, you know, it’s been around forever and “everyone” is there. And I worked at getting friends and followers, and making the page a bit more presentable than the default…. and I couldn’t get past the nagging “why do I think this is worth it?”. After a bit, I came to understand that the community was now a sea of musicians marketing themselves to each other. Kinda like a world-sized networking session with name tags being the only thing to go on, and not an actual opportunity to be seen. I’d get friend requests from folks who obviously were only looking for giant numbers – otherwise, why are gangsta rappers, punk bands and metal maniacs looking to be friends with me? Checking out their pages would show me things like 8673 profile views and 8225 “friends” – two months after they signed on. Uh-huh. But that isn’t all that turned me off to the “service”.

It started sinking in that what bothered me the most about the advertising wasn’t that it was targeted to demographic models I don’t come remotely close to fitting in (I can ignore those easily enough), but that MySpace uses the shear numbers of musicians (and what few actual fans still go there) to sell the advertising. So now I’m emotionally saddled with an account in a community owned by a corporation I despise, and which is using my presence to generate income for itself. And from which I’m getting no visible benefit  – and don’t see that changing.

Wait! There must be something useful there. Ummm…. you can list your tour itinerary. I don’t tour, and there are lots of other places to list show dates. There’s a blogging tool. Blogging tools are everywhere. What isn’t there is far more obvious than what is. There aren’t any actual fans, because it no longer is a social media site used by anyone. We’ve all gone to Facebook (which has its own issues regarding musician friendliness).

And I did nothing about it. Yeah, I stopped updating the page, I stopped looking for “friends”, and I was ruthless in ignoring anyone who asked to be friends. But I’m still there… so I’m still helping Murdoch’s mega-conglomerate generate income. And then I read Andrew Dubber‘s post Myspace – Now With Glitter on Music Think Tank. He raises more points than I had considered, and he uses a tellingly descriptive four-letter word for those of us with accounts there: “bait”. Towards the end, he states, “Meanwhile you’ll continue to offer your fans the corn syrup-filled goods and debt-creating services of planet-raping, child-enslaving corporate psychopaths. Or maybe Oxfam. Who knows?”.

Ok. The light has finally brightened to where I see what I need to do. On October 24th, along with who knows how many others, I’m pulling the plug on my MySpace page – and I’m going to try to get the folks involved with the other pages I’m affiliated with to do the same. (Actually, I don’t have to ask about one of them because the other parties have already abandoned that music ship.) Will I be part of a mass exodus? I don’t know – I hope so, but it doesn’t matter. Screw Rupert Murdoch, the major labels still hanging on to their archaic business models, and all the other corporate entities that use the ad space to push products that have no social benefit to anyone.

As Dubber stated, “Tom is not my friend”.

(update 10/24) Well, the deeds are done – except that MySpace is going to take anywhere from 24-48 hours to accomplish each task. Surprised? Not I.