Dear Friends,

Almost a year and a half has passed since I wrote my previous post on MySpace, and now I'm back, to write about the same thing - that, in essence, I'm not checking MySpace anymore.

Why?

There are at least a few reasons: For one, our son, Benjy, was born at the very beginning of July. He's an amazing kid, and as you can see by the picture, he can't stop smiling - unless he's hungry, of course.  As you can imagine, parenting takes up pretty much everything that used to be known as "free time".

For another reason, life simply became much busier. At this moment, I'm writing scores for two feature films, a short, and a number of concert pieces... There's a lot of writing to do, and I can't listen to music while writing it!.. I wish the opposite were true, but talk radio is my limit.. :)

When I'm not writing, I'm almost always either in a rehearsal, recording, or strolling with the baby.

And finally, I think that the social networking aspect of MySpace has pretty much gone to pieces and become incredibly irrelevant. What does it mean to become a "Friend"? When I once told my accordionists that my friend "friended me on MySpace yesterday", he had a great laugh. As did we all.

Each day, I get 10-15 "friend requests" -- but it almost seems as if half of those were made by an auto-pilot adder program, because the comments seem very generic, or the band's music is so completely in a different direction from ours. To be sure, a few of the friend requests each day are genuine, and I'm grateful for all of them... But on the whole, I'd be much happier with an email to my regular email.

There was a time, about 3-4 years ago, when MySpace was an extremely potent vehicle for connecting musicians with new listeners and friends. Everyone in the music world big and small jumped in and posted profiles, songs, blogs. For a time, you could get a record deal and get booked in solid venues, simply based on your MySpace friend or play count.

I have personally made many meaningful and long-lasting friendships through MySpace in its early days.  I used to listen to music on MySpace for an hour or two a day.  Those were deliriously happy days.

However, now the beast has grown too big. Out of 16,000 friends, I have personally communicated with 300 - at most -- and most of that was done a long time ago.  MySpace has never been an effective means of communication, whether you have 16,000 friends or 30. Competition from Facebook and LinkedIN has made MySpace update their interface a bit, but I still have no access to a database of our fans, I cannot group them by regions; I cannot check MySpace email on my phone, which pretty much means that I get to read MySpace once a month at maximum, given my current workload...

Because of this, I've been forced to bite the bullet and let MySpace "approve" all of my friends automatically from now on. This probably sounds apocalyptic and hilarious at the same time, and it's meant to be.  Given that MySpace's friend requests expire after 30 days, I ended up disappointing people left and right when I don't approve them in due time -- and if I did get to approve anyone, it was usually in a mad flurry, trying to deal with 300+ requests in one shot...  I haven't had a chance to listen to a song on MySpace in the past 2 years, at least.

MySpace is still great for having a 1-page website with a few songs and performance dates, and I still plan to update the songs when new ones are ready. (I'm already updating the show dates via ArtistData).

At any rate, please excuse the extended post, and thank you for reading it.

I love to hear from friends & fans alike, always and often.
If you would like to get in touch -- please find me on twitter.com/ljovadotcom
or please email me directly.  I can't guarantee an immediate response, but it will be much faster than emailing me on MySpace.

Thank you so much!

Enjoy the music,

warmly,
Ljova
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Website: http://www.Ljova.com
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1311785/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ljovadotcom
Video: http://Ljova.com/video