[Dixielandjazz] MySpace For Old Folks

[Stephen G Barbone]

If you want to feel REALLY old, read this article claiming that in  
order to reach older people, MySpace is courting old musicians. And  
then you read who, and find that these musicians are from 15 to 35  
years younger than you are. <grin>
However, if you search MySpace you'll find some Louis Armstrong et al.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone

June 4, 2009 - NY TIMES - by Paul Boutin
MySpace Offers Rock and Jazz Classics

Tila Tequila, the amorous reality-show enthusiast and sometime singer,  
can take a lot of the credit for ruining MySpace’s reputation. Her  
popular member page, myspace.com/tilatequila, on America’s most- 
visited social network is so overloaded with pictures and videos of  
her in scantily clad outfits that it may lock up your browser.

Many of MySpace’s member profiles — of which it has more than 100  
million — are juvenile and crude. But there’s a hidden side to the oft- 
mocked social networking site: It has become a great place for people  
who were grooving to Fleetwood Mac 14 years before Tila was born.  
MySpace may now be the best place for grown-ups to find free music on  
the Web.

Miles Davis has a MySpace page, and 168 of the trumpet player’s albums  
and singles have been uploaded to his MySpace area, including the  
formerly rare LP “Circle in the Round.” A few clicks away are 68  
Billie Holiday records.

MySpace’s hyperactive profile pages rocked the Internet when the site  
opened in the summer of 2003. Since then, Facebook and Twitter have  
stolen MySpace’s buzz, especially for older, less self-promotional  
adults. These are the people who want to reconnect with friends from  
school without posting “MySpace angle” self-portraits that flaunt  
their sexual desirability.

“I guess I’m just the wrong age for MySpace,” shrugged a former  
MySpace user, now in her late 30s, at a cafe in San Francisco’s  
Mission district. A graying Facebook user at the next table chimed in,  
“I never figured out what MySpace was for. Does anyone still use it?”

To attract older users, MySpace sought out older musicians. The first  
upload of U2’s “Get On Your Boots” video in February — the singer Bono  
is now 49 — went straight to MySpace in an exclusive deal. Neil Young,  
who turned 63 last November, posts his iconoclastic, low-rent music  
videos atmyspace.com/neilyoung.

Lionel Richie, another heavy MySpace presence, is using the site to  
promote his new release “Just Go,” which came out in May. “If I  
weren’t an avid MySpace user, I would run out of stuff to talk to my  
teenage kids about,” Mr. Richie said in an e-mail message. Not content  
to be confined online, Mr. Richie joined with MySpace to produce a  
free live show on May 31 at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles. The  
event was one of a series the company calls MySpace Secret Shows. The  
only way to get into a Secret Show, scalpers aside, is to join MySpace  
and pounce on the print-it-yourself tickets that become available at  
noon on the day of the show.

Mr. Richie, who turns 60 on June 20, seems still hungry to win fans,  
to score another top-of-the-charts hit. But what about rock stars  
who’ve hung up their guitar straps for good? MySpace has made deals  
with record labels to create album pages and artist homes for mature  
acts, like the Goth rockers the Cure, who no longer crank out records  
or go on big tours. The Cure performed a Secret Show in December.  
Then, instead of tackling new material for another album, the band  
posted the live tracks of their hits to MySpace.

Besides its extensive catalog — try to find Mötley Crüe’s “Dr.  
Feelgood” in Pandora’s streaming library — MySpace has a simple,  
singular seductive advantage over its rival listening post Imeem and  
the Apple iTunes Store: visitors can listen to any of the music on  
MySpace free, instantly, the whole song, without being forced to sign  
up. You can swoon to Miles’s trumpet from any computer, without  
needing to remember yet another password.

Ten years after Napster, the music industry has learned to work with  
the Internet. You can spend hours poring through the archives at  
imeem.com, where users have painstakingly uploaded songs and videos  
you thought you’d never see again: Iggy Pop wriggling on “The Old Grey  
Whistle Test,” or David Bowie’s wonderfully bizarre 1979 appearance on  
“Saturday Night Live.”

Many other sites are worth touring. Pandora is probably the most  
talked about. Type in the name of a band or a song and Pandora will  
create a custom playlist for you, using mathematical models to guess  
what you’d like to hear next. Blip.fm is the hip site with younger  
fans, who build their own D.J. playlists and trade messages (“blips”)  
in a sort of Napster-meets-Twitter interface.

MySpace doesn’t require you to sign up or log in, but members get  
privileges. First, they can create custom playlists that mix  
superstars and garage bands from five million-plus artists onto one  
virtual mix tape. Second, members are able to flip MySpace into a Lite  
mode. The recently introduced option replaces busy-looking profile  
pages with stripped-down HTML that looks like — well, Facebook.

To monetize its listeners’ warm fuzzy feelings, MySpace directs  
visitors to Amazon.com. There, they can buy Mr. Richie’s new album as  
a $9.99 compact disc or download the single “Just Go” for 79 cents.  
The MP3 files have no copy protection technology, so they’ll play on  
almost any computer, iPod, MP3 player, smartphone or other gadget.  
Amazon splits its revenue with MySpace and the record labels, which  
presumably pay the musicians.

MySpace works fine as a classic-hits machine. It can dispel the drone  
of a workday with James Taylor’s archive, Billy Joel’s 50-record  
catalog, and all 26 tracks of Leonard Cohen’s “Live in London.” By  
serving fortysomethings, the company does face one risk: Once parents  
bookmark Miles Davis’s page, will MySpace still be cool with their kids?