"MySpace", the name sounds like a small child’s safe zone or clubhouse; my initial impression was that it was a chat room for kids. It was when I saw the capabilities and easiness of configuring the site that I was signed on. It was in the hours of trolling new band after new band that I knew that MySpace was a music producer's dream.

Last of the Old School, First of the New School

You see, I was born in 1978. I am from one of the last generations that did not have cell phones in our high school; I am still waiting for the web page to download on my computer from my first year of college. Some of you remember might remember the early life of the user internet, waiting forever for a web page to load, slowly, line, by, line, longer,…, if there,… were,… pictures. But, as those of you who used the street maps inside of the phone book to find a street can attest to, a lot was different then and sometimes I don’t even know how I managed before. In particular, booking bands and promoting musicians was very different and has now been completely revolutionized by the social networking platform called MySpace.

Taping Walls

I got my first stage managing gig when I was eighteen in a small club off the campus of Ohio State in 1996. Above the club was a head shop that had a taping wall; I am not digging too deep in time here but things have changed at a fast clip in ten years. The taping wall had live shows recorded on audio cassette tapes of the Grateful Dead, The Doors, Phish, and Jimi Hendrix lined up and down the wall by year; the head shop had “tons” of tapes, they had to have had a hundred tapes! You would go in the head shop with a tape or buy a blank, high quality TDK of course, and pay a small fee for the shop to make you a tape. This was 1997 and having a hundred tapes was considered fanatic.

Booking Bands in The Early Nineties

The way the music scene worked in 1996 was a band had to have a bio to book gigs; if you wanted to book a gig or get signed, or do anything, you had to have a band bio. The standard band bio included a tape of your music of course. A taping of a show would suffice but to get taken seriously you wanted to have a studio quality recording. Remember, this was pre “studio in a laptop” era; no one had a studio except for the costly professional studios; with whom a band had to pay or trade for some recording time to make a quality demo for their bio. Once a band had a tape, they needed to have photographs. A band didn’t want to have too bit pics or the scary, “dead in the basement” look of Polaroid shots of their band. Many musicians and bands doing anything serious hired a professional photographer or had professional pictures DEVELOPED. Developed is a chemical process in which …you get the point. Already, with the tape and the photos alone the band is looking at a small investment even before they can get a gig.

Typewriters

The bio also included a typed biography describing the band, who they are, where they are from musically and geographically, what is their music type, what are they trying to do live on stage, where and how were they trained, and all types of any materials that might be relevant to producers. All this would be included in the must have manila envelope, not sealed.

Exasperating! For the band a costly and timely venture; many bands flaked on and broke up just in trying to create their bio, finding that trying to work together to build the marketing tools was too much for them. For the producers it was a time consuming occupation. A producer has to open up the bio, put the tape in the cassette player, press play, fast forward, play, fast forward, fast forward, while reading the bands bio to see if they are the type of band you want playing at their establishment. This process took many hours and many nights reviewing bands. A lot of time spent to find that a band is not that good; yet, most of the bands to make it through the bio process had the talent to at least get a gig.

Now, musicians and bands have all that digitally composed in one neat and east to use digital format. Producers can now troll through twenty times the amount of bands in one sitting taking in the music, history, pictures, and if a band is so inclined, (nudge nudge, wink wink), live videos. MySpace offers a quicker, more comprehensive resume of a band and their fans. MySpace is a musician and producers dream and has changed and industry.

http://www.myspace.com/