Songwriters: Beware the Ides of Myspace
Connect to your listeners directly. They're the only thing that isn't a scam.
I’ve seen social media platforms come and go, and the idea of building a community on them (Substack included) seems insane. Irresponsible. The act of someone who never learns.
Why the anxiety? Put it this way:
Do you know how many Myspace friends I had?
So many.
People would message me and ask, sometimes angrily, for me to “Top 8” them, which meant adding them to a visible list of my eight besties that Myspace provided on my profile page. Sometimes I would grant their requests—after consideration. I had a music player on my page, and followers played my songs a lot. I was living high, because you know who has followers? Leaders.
My point: Do you even know what I’m talking about? How about iLike, MOG, imeem, Makeoutclub, Orkut, Ping, SpiralFrog, Friendster, Shelfari, turntable.fm, Zune, or late epoch organisms like Vine, Google+, StumbleUpon, Klout, Twitter #music, or Yik Yak?
These are digital corpses, now splattered like bugs on the windshield of the Wayback Machine.
What happened?
The big fish ate the little ones. Myspace ate several. It changed its spelling from MySpace, to Myspace, to myspace, literally shrinking typographically alongside its user base and valuation.
Myspace still makes headlines occasionally: In 2019, it apologized—to whom, I’m not sure—for losing twelve years’ worth of music uploads in a “migration error.” Charles Darwin would have understood. Hummingbirds, social media platforms—migration is hard. Not everyone survives.
How Does This Relate to Songwriting?
Two ways.
Writing: If you think the above information is archaic, weird, or irrelevant, imagine writing a timeless song and mentioning Blingee’ing your Myspace page. How would the song hold up? Sure, it might work—I love songs about beepers, and T-Birds, and wagon wheels, and steam trains—but tech is a time stamp, and it might keep a universal emotion frozen on a surface level, even if the rest of the song goes deep. If you can, maybe try to avoid writing a heartfelt love song that’s in danger of a response like, “Oh, wow, I remember Sony Discmans!” In Writing a Song that Matters, singer-songwriter Dar Williams suggests not calling out a technology until it has existed for at least 20 years. Worth considering.
Career: When we build a fan base on the shifting sands of social media, we become beholden and addicted to that platform. Those platforms have proven, time and again, that (1) they cannot guarantee how long they’ll live, and (2) they are not a reliable member of the team of your songs. They jiggle their algorithms. They erect tollbooths between our fans and us. They sell our data; they bury our gig announcements. Not good!
The best connection we have to our listeners is whatever the most direct route is. The fewer middlemen, the better. This is why there’s nothing like converting a fan face-to-face at a live show. It’s also why platforms offer profile pages and in-app communication but not email addresses because that would cut those platforms out of the loop. Marketers know all this, but I’m not talking to marketers. I go to shows all the time. My students call out their Instagram handles—and then it’s back to the music. It kills me.
Get the email addresses or the phone numbers for texting. Beware the Ides of Myspace.
Songwriting Prompt: What Won’t Change?
At re:MARS 2019, Amazon’s global artificial intelligence and machine learning event, then-CEO Jeff Bezos was asked what changes he predicted we’d see within the next ten years. He responded, “The bigger question is, ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?’ Look at what’s stable in time and continue to focus there.” In other words, look for permanence in an impermanent world.
Bezos’s answer reminded me of a meditation I once learned that asks the practitioner to contemplate God: The definition of God, in this case, is “the part that does not change.” Themes of permanence run through the Bible, too. (“For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed”—Malachi 3:6.) It’s also central to the teachings of Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda. (“Where motion ceases, God begins.”) And Bezos isn’t the only Silicon Valley titan who has thought this way: At Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s funeral, guests were presented with a brown box containing Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and one of Jobs’s close friends, said this search for our enduring qualities “was the last thing he wanted us to all think about.”
So, let’s think about it: What won’t change?
Whatever constant is revealed is foundational; it can be built on. Write about that.
(Excerpted from Music, Lyrics, and Life, now available in audiobook, read by me)
…or you could just buy me a coffee, if you like.