My space, not Myspace.

I don’t see anything wrong with using Myspace for networking if you’re a musician. It increases your ability to connect with other artists and to get your work listened to. It’s definitely a good thing.

However, a few musicians I’ve met (let’s call one of them ‘Artist A’) have deleted their ‘official’ websites and now use their Myspace page alone. So you can no longer look at the nice ArtistA.co.uk website, you have to go to myspace.com/ArtistA instead. Artist A now ‘belongs’ to Myspace; Artist A no longer has their own unique internet identity, Artist A is now ‘Artist A ; part of Myspace‘.

Most of the musicians, including Artist A said they’ve done this because it’s free and because it’s easier for them to update. The irony is that they’ve potentially made it more difficult – or at least less pleasant – for other people to use. Not only that, but they’ve now no longer got a completely unique web presence that’s undominated by something bigger. Not exactly the best move.

For a start, the first thing people see when they visit Artist A’s Myspace page is a big advertisement at the top, perhaps for a celebrity ‘musician’. Hold on, I thought it was meant to be Artist A’s page, not Lady Gaga(whoever the fuck that is)’s. Then below that, there are a bunch of links that take you somewhere else. Search, browse, music, video, myspace homepage… Oh and then beneath the bit that says “Myspace music” (err… whose music is it? Artist A’s music or Myspace’s?) there’s the bit about Artist A. Often including a picture that’s been forcibly resized so much that you need a magnifying glass to see any detail in it.

On the left there’s the contact box, which you have to log in to use. This is an inconvenience to people who want to contact Artist A – why should they have to become a member just to be able to send Artist A a message? Considering how long it takes to join up, I would rather not waste my time if I wasn’t already a member.

Then there’s the music player on the right. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve frustratedly refreshed the page to try and get it to work, whether I’m at home, at someone else’s house, in an internet cafe or in a library. Needless to say, it doesn’t work on every computer, and it doesn’t work all of the time. I’m already unimpressed, uninspired and unmotivated by Artist A because of the tiny picture and the inability to contact him or her without joining Myspace. Now I can’t even listen to his or her music?!

You have to scroll down to see the actual text part of Artist A’s profile, and it is severely limited. It’s not just limited by the amount of text that can be input, but it’s limited by ‘categories’ of text. Placement of pictures is limited too. The overall layout is limited, as it’s kept in segregated sections, and there is only one page to put it all on rather than being able to spread it out over numerous pages. This ensures that most myspace profiles appear cluttered, cramped, and sometimes a bit chaotic. In other words, ugly as fuck.

Some Myspace pages are quite aesthetically pleasing but most of them are terrible, whether they’re made with the mundane, unmodified identikit layout that comes as standard, or fully customised computer-whizz works of ‘art’ that someone has spent hours ‘creating’ (i.e. copy-and-pasting). I’ve seen a few pages that are completely unreadable either because they feature light text on a really cluttered background, or black text on a really dark background (do these fuckwits not even look at their pages before they inflict them on the general public?). I once wanted to stab myself in the eyes after looking at one person’s profile, just to ensure that I’d never see such an aesthetically atrocious abomination again.

It’s possible to use css and other web authoring code to make a page look good but if someone has the ability to do that then why not make a proper website as well, instead of giving people myspace as the only option of finding out more about them?

Underneath that, the friend space and particularly the friend comments section can spiral out of control if left unchecked. Do other people really want to read Artist A’s friends’ comments? The comment section is a waste of space whose only purpose is to boost Artist A’s ego by showing how popular he or she is. Unfortunately, if Artist A is really popular and has a big ego, you are forced to load a page that would take about a mile of scrolling to get to the bottom. Why should I waste my bandwidth downloading something I don’t need to see? Also, when there are hundreds of friend comments containing large jpeg images and youtube clips (more often than not advertising something), Artist A’s page starts to take up a large chunk of a computer’s memory. This can cripple lower-specced machines, sending them into a really frustrating spasm of slowness. Not everyone can afford a weapon with 2gig RAM and a super fast processor. It doesn’t help that some people ‘design’ their pages with no consideration for the reader; user-unfriendly, graphics-intensive, memory-hogging profiles that are difficult to navigate and can make your run computer painfully slowly.

So, altogether, Artist A has bored me, bombarded me with adverts, made my eyes bleed, temporarily turned my computer into a spasmodic pile of barely-functioning wreckage, and blackmailed me into submitting my (falsified) details to a very dodgy corporation. Thanks a lot? You know what, fuck you and your music.

Despite all its benefits, Myspace profiles just cannot substitute for a properly-designed, advert-free website that isn’t owned by some wrinkly cunt who owns far too much of the media.