Feb 07 2006
Danny Schmidt at MySpace.com
MySpace.com - Danny Schmidt. I don’t really know what this is, but it seems you can listen some tracks from Danny Schmidt’s latest album here, you can leave messages for him, order CDs — stuff like that. Danny writes:
I probably won’t be answering any messages over here… Nothing personal. I just spend too much time in front of my computer as it is. I gotta, you know, practice my guitar and rhyme couplets and shit.
Yeah, this entire ‘myspace’ thing has gone too far. I realize musicians have to sometimes do things they don’t want to in order to get their music out in front of a different crowd. But it’s obvious most of those top-quality indie musicians of Danny’s calibre are just hanging billboard pages on myspace. Yeah, like Kris Delmhorst checks her friggin’ myspace page every 30 minutes. Right. Personally, I think it’s beneath them.
I hope myspace is just this year’s fad.
A couple things I’ve noticed about this MySpace fad:
- Their users love to steal images using URls from other sites. I disabled image bandwidth stealing, but a lot of people still try to do it.
- Their personal pages are the most annoying I’ve come across. Worse than Geocities (remember them?): too many animated images, music and videos that play automatically, pages that are 58 feet long…
Yes, I hope it’s a fad; however, Danny’s is an exception; it’s the best designed one I’ve come across there.
I’ll plead ignorance. I’ve heard of “myspace” but I have no idea what it is. I tend to shy away from sites that include “my,” “community,” and “social.” When I went to Danny’s MySpace page, it took me about 10 seconds to close it. It just looks like a typical overly-busy page that I wouldn’t want to visit. I’ve seen ‘em before, and I’m not interested.
Jody, funny you should mention bandwidth. A few weeks ago my hosting service told me that I was using up lots of bandwidth due to hotlinking from MySpace sites. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I set up an .htaccess file to stop it.
I like the way Danny introduced his MySpace page in his newsletter/email thingy:
“You know that queezy feeling in your stomach when you first walk into school that first day after a really bad haircut, and your face is all squoonched up, bracing itself against that first splintering gale of abuse that you’re gonna get from your friends about the lawn mower accident? You ever had that feeling?
Well, I now have a MySpace page.”
A musician friend of mine has a My Space page, and he uses it to share his compositions, and it gives his fans a chance to share his music with others. We can contact other friends who haven’t heard of him but might like his music, and say, “You have to hear this!”
It’s just another way for musicians to get their music out there. Yes, Schmidt is a pretty good artist, but who outside of certain circles has heard of him? Look at it this way - it’s another marketing strategy, an attempt to reach out to a brand-new audience who are really into My Space.
An article about MySpace.com.