Got No Friends

Got No Friends

MySpace may not be the most effective way to promote your music, but it sure is fun.

Written By

Randy Nordschow

After over a year of procrastinating, I finally got around to creating a page for myself on MySpace.com. Okay, I haven’t uploaded any music yet, but I plan to over the weekend. After poking around the site a little, I discovered just how many of us composition-types are represented. A blanket search by genre reveals around 10,000 self-identifying classical music practitioners. Cool.

As voyeuristic as it sounds, I’ve been poking around people’s profiles, in particularly the “my friend space” section. Being a MySpace newbie, the only friend I have listed is that ubiquitous Tom guy—he’s got to be some sort of ploy concocted by big brother to put a friendly face on tech support, right? Tom has over 58 million friends; I on the other hand “have 1 friends.” [sic] So you can understand why I was a little jealous pursing former NewMusicBox part-timer Rob Wilkerson’s list of friends, which is 500+ strong and includes folks like Björk, The Shins, Death Cab for Cutie, and Fiona Apple—go Rob! It’s not like I’m into fame worship or anything like that (although I have to admit that I was little excited that Kyle Gann actually typed my name on his trusty computer keyboard a couple of weeks ago), but I am quite impressed seeing that you can’t just add friends at will without the whole invite and approval protocol. Just to be clear, this little musing isn’t some elaborate plea for more MySpace friends—those desperate emails are already in the works, so be on the lookout folks—because I’m perfectly fine with friendlessness as long as it’s confined solely to the digital realm.

For those of you out there who haven’t planted your flag on MySpace’s virtual real estate yet, what are you waiting for? As things stand at the moment, you’ll probably rack up more page views and give more people the chance to hear your music on MySpace as compared to NewMusicJukeBox—something my fellow American Music Center coworkers are plotting to change. The theory goes: Marketplace sensibilities run counter to modern composition practice, i.e. the general public hates what we call new music. Eh, there’s no accounting for taste. Clearly, NewMusicJukeBox isn’t designed for casual web surfers anyway. Its users typically posses a sophisticated musical vocabulary and visit the site with a specific reason in mind. Makes me wonder how our music got to be so non-frivolous?

The way I see it, casting a wider net never hurts, even if page views, rankings, and friend lists never amount to any new fans of my own music. But hey, it’s not much of a time investment involved, so I decided to give the general public yet another chance to love me. While I may be late in hopping on the MySpace bandwagon, so far I have no regrets (and no friends).