I'm a MySpace fan - I think it has its place and people can expect too much though. The "Arctic Monkeys broke through MySpace" story is a popular myth, just an untrue story which served the purposes of both Arctic Monkeys and MySpace, and lots of people seem to remember it. There's the power of myths for you (recommended further reading - Seth Godin, "All Marketers Are Liars")

MySpace is very trendy (like wristbands were last year), and people will probably have got bored of it by Christmas, but I'd suggest we use it while its hot and not hasten its demise - it's very convenient for finding new stuff, and for other people to find us. I had a call this week from an artist I put on Chill and promoted on our MySpace page. He's not finding success because of MySpace but because his stuff is good and unique, he's using every contact and opportunity which comes to promote it, and the people who can hear him want to work with him.

Consumers on MySpace love collecting friends, bumping up the numbers, and forgetting about all but a few people they'd normally want to spend time with anyway. Everyone likes to look popular, but we still need a few good people we can really trust. Same with music - having lots of channels is nice, but easy to get bored of - we still need a filter to point us to the small amount of stuff we'll grow to love.

What's the betting the people who'll lead the way slagging off MySpace will be the people with huge expectations whose music wasn't any good to start off with? (Good luck telling them though!)

Rods wrote:
Pondered this comment and thought that on our site we have quite a few of our friends who have linked their personal site through to one of our songs, so possibly when our song is played on their site it registers as a play on our host site.

this is true. we've got the first track of our myspace on several other frontpages and these do indeed count as plays.