Is MySpace a legit replacement for the zine culture of the 80s/90s?

- list of fave songs, films, etc
- picture
- list of 'friends'
- pithy line
- er, that's it.

not much in the way of content.

Contains everything you *actually* need to know about a band - enough songs for a demo, photos, short bio/influences, list of gigs, and a whole gang of other fans.

I can't remember the last time I went to an official site. In terms of fanzines, MySpace is the new black.

Zine culture - no, it can't handle that level of content.

This is probably true.

However, I really don't understand the hatred for MySpace. As a musician/indie band, it's been the best thing for promotion, exposure, networking, gig-booking, well... being in a band, since, well, the CD-burner!

Anyway, it does bugger all for promoting bands since every band since Christ is on there. No, the Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen do not count. Piss off.

A process that used to take weeks - sending out demos, ringing around clubs to get bookings, trying to sort out support bands etc. - now takes a matter of minutes.

No, I don't think it will win us *that* many new fans - we're talking handfuls to dozens - but in terms of the actual mechanics of running a band on a week to week basis, it's a marvel.

Lily Allen and Sandi Thom to thread

I'd almost guarantee Lily Allen had professional PR people helping her out and/or hustled her ass off doing promotions, which would have made a big impact before Myspace too.

CYHSY did have a good publicist working for them when they broke, btw. David Bowie didn't just happen to decide to come to a show one night.

design advantages of a zine

design advantages of a zine

design advantages of a zine

design advantages of a zine

design advantages of a zine

I certainly hope that you don't mean that MySpace is known for its design elements.

Also, I understand that MySpace is a good networking tool, but that's just true of the internet in general... are most bands now really abandoning their websites for a MySpace page? Because I kind of find that sad.

Zines were a network. A crude, ephemeral, often inacessible network. Like stringing tin cans together to cross a gap of driveways.

And in this sense, the functional sense, My Space has totally replaced the "zine scene". And the tape-trading scene. And whatever else was out there prior to '95.

"The Inter-Net" connects kidz to bands to ideas to clothes to celebrities to criticism to art to other kidz. And it does it a million times better than zines ever did. Plus, it's democratic. Zines were always kinda an "insider/outsider" thing. My Space and blogs and other, similar net resources are for everybody.

Since when can anyone download using MySpace, btw? That's all samples and the such ... I mean, you can actually sell music through the Web sites. That's why MySpace only goes so far. But am I missing something?

Anyone providing music can, if they choose, set the files so they can be downloaded flat out instead of only streamed. It's always been an option as far as I can remember; I'm sure others can correct me as needed. I've picked up a slew of tracks that way from out of print CDRs and the like, and if the bands/musicians themselves are the ones putting them up, which of course they are 99% of the time, then there you go.

-- trees (meltingglacier...), July 7th, 2006.

I don't know what most bands are doing, but the advantages of Myspace to an unsigned band make it pretty much no contest. Unless you happen to have a close friend or bandmate who's a top-notch web designer, you're looking at thousands of dollars in design and maintenance of a site, assuming you want a good one (and a crappy one seems almost worse than no site at all) and want to be able to handle the bandwith usage that comes from a lot of song play and downloading. I know a lot of bands probably do have that friend or bandmate, but we don't. We did our site cheap using a graphic design student, but we're not happy with it anymore and no longer know how to get in touch with the designer.

-- mike a (mik...), July 7th, 2006.

Not necessarily true. I've rekindled old relationships and stayed in touch with distant friends that I otherwise probably wouldn't have thanks to MySpace. It's a useful tool in several aspects.

I find it sad, I guess, because having a template like MySpace's is so poorly designed, and thus constrained-- it takes out unpredictability and fun from navigating through a band's stuff. It also divorces the band/group from its own context-- as in, Tan As Fuck/Taiwan Deth's website is very much a reflection of their aesthetic. Same with Excepter's. And both are simple, simple sites.

OTM

If you could get together three or four other collections of that size you could create a fairly accurate picture of what was going on at the time. I guess you could archive myspace in a similiar way on a hard drive, but somehow that doesn't seem the same to me.

It seems like music was more interesting and mysterious when everybody wasn't an email away.

It's not worth killing about, but then I am a mature adult.

So who is THIS? Nice choice of words. I simply said that I had no idea that this was a business thread. I thought ILM was a board for music enthusiasts.

I miss the mystery too but at least once in a while you get something like the Ariel Pink homepage that was up for two years (greatest band website ever).

I see what Maria means, but even the most slapdash teenage zine job required a degree of thought and effort that MySpace and Blogger effectively eliminate. Even if it was just 8 pages of scribbled thoughts, you had to a) actually write all that stuff down, b) lay it out, c) find a source of free or cheap photocopying, d) collate and staple everything, and e) figure out a way for others to read it: send out trade copies, bring a handful to shows, put a classified in MRR, or bring the whole shebang down to your local record store and hope the snarky clerk doesn't sneer too much.

Between all of the above, you're talking at least a couple days of solid work to assemble even a shitty zine, and several weeks of part-time follow up to get the thing in people's hands and mailboxes.

I've put out tiny, hastily-written zines and I've done bigger productions. Even though the tiny zines were easier to coordinate, they were nowhere NEAR as easy as opening a Blogger account, selecting from a premade layout and typing away. There are pros and cons to each, but I'll always stick up for zine editors, because I know the labor involved.

Myspace is nothing like a zine, although I used to spend time creating a zine and now I spend time on myspace.

...which isn't pathetic at all, if you're a band. To me, the most logical use of MySpace for bands isn't promoting the band but keeping in touch with the fans. You let people at your shows know about your MySpace, half of them are on it anyway so why not add you? Now they can check out your recorded sound if they were iffy on buying a CD, and probably most usefully, they'll get a bulletin for the next tour so they can come to your next show, hype it to their friends, street-team, whatever. Plus, I mean, having pictures and stuff to leave comments on just creates a context for fan-artist dialogue ("You guys totally rock!"). The old approach of having a listserv can't come close.

Oh, and as for zines, they have nothing to do with MySpace IMO, and it's weird that it would be suggested - MySpace isn't a publishing medium! I don't know of anybody who uses it as one, except for blogging. I sort of see the idea with "networking" as a general concept but I think several other posters are right to suggest that it's the internet, generally that's taking up that role, although without the self-evidently DIY, hands-on, personal touch. MySpace is one tiny part of this picture, which also includes personal webpages, messageboards like this one, Wiki, Art of the Mix, and about ten thousand other things on the web.

YOU WIN THE OTM PRIZE.

Yes yes yes, but which of these is owned by a HUGE corporation and has millions upon millions of people looking at its pages all the time? Is Art of the Mix even around anymore?

Yes. Wow, that wasn't very hard to find out at all.

i'm tryign to leave my balls off ilm lately, so

i don't think i've ever visited myspace.com.

what planet do you hail from?

hangon is it from www.meewsic.com or some such? i've been meaning to kill filter those bastards

Yeah, where did those idiots come from. They seem to have stopped hassling me now, at least.

MySpace is a networking tool. It lets kids interact with other kids. It allows the formation of fluid mini-cultures, and for the transmission of ideas and enthusiasms within and between those cultures. Kids use it to connect with other kids, to play social games, and to find out about stuff (especially bands).

Bands, on the other hand, use MySpace to post information, share tracks, and communicate with fans and other bands. In this sense, as a way to connect unsigned/up-and-coming bands directly with fans, MySpace has no precendent. It's a fantastic tool.

A lot of posters here want to distinguish MySpace pages from blogs, on the basis of a perceived lack of "content" in MySpace. This makes no sense. All MySpace pages have a built-in blog. If most pages are mostly content-free, this simply reflects the fact that most PEOPLE are content-free.

There are some good MySpace pages out there. And there are MILLIONS of shitty ones. That's the downside of democracy: every two-bit idiot has a voice. And a fucking animated web page with danching hamsters. If you want to find the substance, you have to be willing to wade through ten miles of garbage. Which is a problem, but it's kind of a beautiful problem.

And, after all, you can still make a zine. Tons of people do it. There are still lots of small-circulation rock culture magazines out there. While MySpace and similar sites/resources have more-or-less transcended the 80s/90s indie/underground "zine culture", that culture still exists, albeit in a slightly different form.

P.S. "They just shit bad colors all over the place." Shitting bad colors all over the place is cool. See: album art for Black Dice, Lightning Bolt, Kill Me Tomorrow, etc.; art by the Paper Rad collective; video game hacks by Cory Arcangel; and so on.

oh man, I'm finally cool!

Think I'll buy a canvas and hang this post-seafood and guinness blitz on a wall.

I think the point is more to distinguish MySpace pages from zines, because they're not at all alike! This isn't some sort of anti-internet, anti-template prejudice - it's just sort of blindingly obvious that publishing is not what MySpace is designed to do and not what people use it for, specifically because it would be awkward to do so within the framework of "About Me:", "Music:", "Who I'd Like To Meet," etc. To the extent that people publish on it, it's blogging, and I really don't think anyone would get very far claiming blogging as a whole was even a replacement for zine culture, in the sense that blogs are not like zines. That's not a bad thing about blogs, it's just that they're apples and oranges. I like MySpace and think it's a great tool for what it is, but to try and perform mental origami on it and make it into a mass movement of people delivering their own content to each other (aside from music and to a small extent video and art - but there's del.ico.us for that, right?) just seems like a bunch of wasted effort to me.

Also there seems to be a bit of a PROPER zine renaissance at the moment. I certainly seem to encounter a lot of 'zine sellers at gigs.

www.myspace.com/beardmag

Shameless I know, but what the hell...

a: the tears of a nation.

http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/signjpegs/v/vomit.7.jpg
http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/signjpegs/v/vomit.8.jpg
http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/signjpegs/v/vomit.9.jpg

I think that's the case so they can use less space(and so have more users and more ad traffic) and also attract more 'commercial' oriented artists so they in turn attract a more consumer minded fanbase and are more likely to click ads.

I remember Mp3.com as being a giant pain in the ass (pick a genre! Now, pick a sub-genre! what is your favorite color?) and not generally better-suited to distributing free anything than MySpace, but it's been a while. Could you have more than four free songs up on there? I remember it as being three...

At the END MP3.com was 3 songs only, but before that I think we had our entire first album up(it was intended to be the worst, most annoying album in history. 81 songs).

* Ben Is Dead
* Browbeat
* The ChickenFish Speaks
* Chunklet
* 50 miles of elbow room
* Fat City (Boston)
* Flipside
* Fracture Fanzine (UK)
* Halana
* Hootenanny
* Legends Magazine
* Macaroon Shindig
* Maximum RocknRoll (Tim Yohanna)
* Mutant Renegade
* Obscene Emissions
* Punk Planet
* Ricochet! Ricochet! (UK)
* Smallflowers Press
* Sniffin' Glue (Mark Perry) (UK)
* Underdog Zine

Any of youse familiar with these things? What are they like?

Keep in mind, too, that most zines don't cover music exclusively. Your typical zine might have pop culture articles or talk about social issues, with some music interviews or reviews in the back. So when you talk about "zine culture" to an old-timer, they won't think you just mean music zines.