It’s ironic that over the last few months in what has been probably my most prolific period of creativity that everyone probably thinks I’m dead cos my online profile hasn’t changed. But whilst a good Myspace page these days is a necessity and can certainly help convey some sort of artist image lets not get carried away… 

When I first started using Mypsace it was really hard work, time-consuming, frustrating, exciting and disappointing - getting friends (and keeping them), writing blogs, hours spent making, resizing & uploading pictures, days spent scouring & posting on forums and searching the internet for the code that will make your left hand table half an inch wider or that code generator that’ll make the colour of that table border just right. You’d sit back to admire your work only to find out that meanwhile every other fucker had worked out how to add flash images making your page feel distinctly prehistoric. 

Then there’s the whole ‘friends’ concept. You start off eager and enthusiastic personally replying to everyone who has the decency to post.  Quickly things start to get a bit jaded – the comments start to seem a bit insincere; you can’t be arsed to listen to everyone’s music but you pretend to with a ‘nice tunes mate’ comment or a ‘nice page’. There’s the constant logging on to see if you have any new “friends”. New friend requests are exciting. You think ‘Cool - has word of mouth got round about my amazing tunes??’ Then you discover it’s invariably from scantily clad perma-tanned bimbo inviting you to ‘chat’. New Comments are exciting too – until you discover it’s a giant ‘Thanks for the Add’ (if your lucky) band advertisement. And new messages invariably ARENT offers of record deals or instant fame. Well sometimes they are but theyre dodgy as hell. More often than not it’s someone starting yet another mp3 portal ‘which is free to join!’ only problem being there are already thousands of these sites & the only fuckers visiting are other musicians suckered  into wasting their time by setting up profiles & uploading music there. (an obvious word of advice – do you really want to be updating a dozen sites every time you release a track,/ announce a gig, or fart ?

Rumours abound of record company execs checking out bands with the most friends so… must get more friends. We jostle for position along with 4 million other artists stumbling blindly around thinking that offer of a contract is just round the corner. We don’t have any time to write music, constantly tweaking our profile caught up in a vicious circle of the above achieving exactly nothing, only disappointment and cynicism. 

lets face it - unless you are (a) extremely marketing savvy (b) amoral (c) prepared to get your kit off and (d) truly great, there’s no money in this and that elusive record deal is unlikely to change that. There’s too much music – were overwhelmed – and not enough time. And there’s many people able to offer something better than you for considerably less (ie free). Basically were just flies buzzing around a big corporate turd fighting for a little piece.

As a final word – my utmost respect to those people that do spend the time to send personal posts, that DO listen the music, better still release podcasts made up entirely from unsigned or unknown music (thanks Jammy Toast!). That’s what it SHOULD be about. Kick out the nasties, make proper friends just do what you enjoy and get your priorities right

Well that’s about it for now, I really need to make that font type on my ‘About Me’ section more edgy. 

Peace,

Rooks