Every band, artist, and individual out there who is trying to promote themselves knows not only how hard the task is but also once you achieve that you have to maintain and sustain your momentum.

What is the first thing that one thinks about these days when they think “promotion”? They think, Myspace.

It’s not about doing “the in thing”. It happens to be, myspace is where everybody is. You can either fight that or go with it. If you are concerned with promoting yourself you’ll most likely go with it. So, okay enter myspace.com. 

Now every band, artist, and individual out there who has created a profile not only puts time into developing and customizing it but also in networking with people, socializing with people, and sending out friend requests. So how much does it SUCK to be deleted after hours, days, months of hard work?!  It turns out Myspace, at their own whim, haphazardly deletes profiles when there is a certain amount of “activity.” The question is then, naturally, what kind of activity? Now here’s the convoluted part.

What is the first sentence in myspace’s Terms & policy?

“MySpace.com is a social networking service that allows Members to create unique personal profiles online in order to find and communicate with old and new friends.”

Okay, so having that said, let’s go back to the “what kind of activity gets you deleted” question. The farcical answer is any kind - not excluding communicating with old and new friends, or fans in this case - so long as it exceeds a certain amount!

What this signifies is, there is no monitoring or checking of a profile when that profile raises a flag due to the amount of its activity. Myspace simply deletes the profile when the profile surpasses their set arbitrary threshold; which by the way remains a mystery to this day! If you are a legitimate band, artist or individual trying to promote yourself by messaging people, commenting them back or sending out friend requests to people who would have some interest in your endeavor, you, according to myspace are at the same level of a spammer. How about that?! You are not warned first of all that your profile will be deleted because you are doing such and such. Which means, once you go over their threshold, there is no administration (or Tom!) actually checking your profile and analyzing it to treat it as an individual case. Nope. It’s “oh there’s that much activity – DELETE”. So long as they have implicitly maintained three quarters of the human race to drive the traffic on Myspace so that they continue to make money on it, they don’t give two shits about the few profiles they must be deleting every month. Some would say how would they keep track of these particular active profiles. Well, first of all you wouldn’t have to monitor the same profiles every single day. You check it the first time it raises a flag. Then do a little research, observe who the artist or person is and that they are in fact real. Then you check the feedback on their profile and finally conclude whether or not the profile is a guise or a spammer or if it’s indeed legitimate. Why don’t they take the mounds of cash they make and invest in a little bit of a real security staff who can do this sort of every day bullshit? I suppose it’s easier and cheaper to do it the present way. Thus far, this method has worked because it is so intervallic. And that particular deleted band/individual feels so outnumbered, often over whelmed and verily alone. Even us individuals who have sought some explanation, some god dam clarification as to why the profile was deleted have been otherwise denied. Wait, not even denied, just simply not obliged in anyway. Not even a “fuck you, we wanted to delete you and that’s that.” Just, nothing. No responses. No replies to emails. I even personally found myspace.com’s phone number through the Better Business Bureau (you bet your ass I’m filing a report with them about myspace) and have called the number. There’s like 6 menu options to transfer you to different departments like accounting, human resources, etc. About 4 or 5 of those menu options take you right back to the main menu! Like a hellish loop “thanks for calling myspace…” blah blah blah. The remaining menu options take you to some prick’s office phone voice-mail that happens to be “too full” to leave a message. How convenient! The rest of the extensions ring on into the abyss of eternity. I’m pretty sure that phone number “worked better” when they first started out. Now? Yeah it’s “broken”.

People, this could happen to anybody. It could happen to you or to your friends’ profiles who happen to be bands or artists and who’ve happened to work really hard to get some kind of momentum going. Just like Jersey based metal band Randall Flagg.

Randall Flagg is a legitimate band who had a profile since 2004. They had amassed over 14,000 fans/friends with over 30,000 plays. Just recently it was deleted! For no apparent reason other than, if one were to try to explain it through myspace’s rationale, they started to get busy and also were promoting themselves heavily. (Here’s the new myspace page, how ironic!: www.myspace.com/randallflaggmusic)

See, Tom has armed most of the patrons of myspace with a SPAM button. This too presents a problem. He thought, I guess, that the best way to fight SPAMMERS was not by upping security, but by giving all the people of myspace and kids on myspace no less to decide what is spam and what isn’t. I mean why are these button pushers on myspace then if they don’t want to be social or be confronted by strangers??? They can’t hit the “deny friend request” button 1 inch to the right?? Why does myspace itself exist when you can’t indeed do what they say? – again, read the first sentence of their terms. They figure, the best way to sustain their addictive ego stroking website is to create vigilante style spam indication and a free-for-all. This eliminates the several hard working bands or artists while retaining the larger portion (i.e. traffic) of the site. Coupled with their asinine system of deleting profiles, we don’t stand a chance. And Tom there gets to dick around like a giddy school girl exchanging messages with his “friends” while we get fucked.