The influences of the latest band that wants me to be their lifetime friend
are as follows:-

Beatles, Bread, Michael Jackson, Hall&Oats, Brand New Heavies, Sting, Foreigner, The Roots, Seal's & Crofts, Steely Dan, Lewis Taylor, Jonatha Brooke, Doobie Brothers, Michael McDonald, A Tribe Called Quest, ABBA, Pharcyde, Bee Gees, Christopher Cross, Willy Porter, Beach Boys, CSN, Lionel Richie, Bill Withers, Chicago, MeShell, D'Angelo, Blood Sweat and Tears, Elton John



why dont they READ my profile.. it'll save me time to discover something i may actually like..

Lots of bands just add people to increase their supposed popularity of fanbase. They don't read your profile, just like they don't read mine which says "if you're a band, message me first".

i understand why they do it.. but not when they have 10000 friends

actually i asked your band to be my friend yesterday
i genuinely think you are good though.

So the fact that my band only has around 300 friends is because we don't pester everyone and are quite selective about who we want on our friends list?

Or is it because we're shit?

to be honest its usually the bands with 20000 friends that are shit.


by all means you should pester people on it.. just make sure that they like some of the stuff you do..

The worst are the ones that constantly put unwelcome spam banners in your comments box.

On a slightly different Myspace rant. I can't get on mine AGAIN.

"Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.

This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group."

This message irritates me slightly; but it's probably going to drive some emo kid to top themselves one of these days.

I always get "sorry, that feature is temporarily disabled". Logging in is a pretty important feature, Tom!

I usually only get the "Sorry!..." message when I'm using my band's account but today it's been my personal account too.
I hope that the companies using their advertising space are getting significant reductions in rates.
That'd learn 'em.

It was working this morning, bastarding MySpace.

Sometimes it still amazes me that a site whose homepage is SO tacky, who are constantly having errors as major as not being able to log into your own account, continues to have millions of devoted users and more signing up every minute.

Well, speaking as someone who (ahem!) does MySpace marketing for bands...

Yes, there are a LOT of bands who really, really abuse MySpace. I, too, absolutely loathe comment spam with huge graphics that eff up my personal page, so I rarely inflict it on other people when working for a client. I'd far rather use the filtering features MySpace has in place (e.g., the Google keyword search, the MySpace "filter by music interest" search... but a lot of people running band pages don't even know those features exist.

Also, a lot of times if you're using friend adding software, depending on which prog you're using, it's not really possible to either (a) look at someone's profile before adding them or (b) see that someone does not accept requests from bands. You can sometimes click "Cancel" if you're VERY quick, and I do try to do this, but every so often one is going to slip through. I try to make a note of the person's display name and delete the friend request from my pending requests (something else a lot of folks don't know they can do), but again, one will slip thru every so often.

I was just talking about this with a new client the other day - that it's entirely possible for a band to have too MANY friends and for those friends to be completely useless if they are not accurately targeted. This client is going to be mounting a major US tour in the spring of 2007 and I'm already thinking about what's going to be the best way to get him friends in each city who MIGHT ACTUALLY COME TO THE GIG. Sure, I could go "Find me all people within 50 miles of Cleveland between the ages of 21-100" and end up with 50,000, but would 5% of those folks even consider buying a ticket? Of course not. So you really have to target more narrowly than that.

So for anyone running a band MySpace page, I'd seriously suggest investigating the search options MySpace has available. And put some thought into your search string. Generally speaking my sites seem to have a pretty high acceptance rate (80-90% most days) so I guess I must be doing *something* right!

I eventually took to enabling the 'block all friend requests from bands' option in Myspace Settings. It's just become increasingly apparent they send out friend requests at complete random and, as such, there's no filter or probability you'll enjoy and want to support the band.

Blindly clicking 'accept' doesn't help the band at all: it's only if you take the time to sit and listen to their stuff, decide you like it, go out and BUY their stuff that they'll profit. As I could never give that amount of commitment to 90% of the bands that request me, I now just search for decent bands and add THEM.

I don't mind bands trying to add me, I usually give them a listen before I click deny. Or occasionally, approve.

I've never used the option to block band requests either, even on my personal account. I am, however, deleting more requests from bands without listening to them nowadays than I ever did before.

I'm now going for quality rather than quantity. I've just deleted a load of friends from The Psychotic Reaction's profile so we're down to below 300 again. Most of the bands and other people I deleted were obviously not interested in us and just added anyone to increase their number of friends. Having thousands of "friends" is not a sign of success. I've come to the conclusion that myspace is no use at all for getting new fans. It's main use is networking with other bands, promoters, DJs, fanzines etc and also an extra channel of communication with existing fans. Having more than a few hundred friends is counterproductive because it becomes unmanageable. I think a lot of people have been misled by the Arctic Monkeys myth and believe that if they just get a myspace profile and add lots of friends they'll get famous. It isn't going to happen. Promoting bands still takes a lot of hard work, intelligence, careful planning, and good communication skills (and having a talented band with strong material also helps of course). There are no shortcuts.