While last year the Arctic Monkeys made history by securing a number one hit in the UK after posting their songs for free on MySpace -- without ever releasing an album -- many industry insiders expect that the days of MySpace-assisted fame are numbered. With millions of profiles, it's difficult to "stumble" across something good, but it is the faked profiles that have made it especially difficult for scouts who could once gauge a band's popularity simply by counting their friends and comments. Bands have bought into what's become a mini industry of software, viral marketing services and image consulting built around faking popularity. Now, the shift has transformed label scouts into mathematicians, trained to spot faked pages, and all but forming algorithms and truth squads to do it.
Stephen Brower, director of marketing and A&R development at Vanguard records, said that he uses MySpace to see if a band takes advantage of an opportunity to connect with fans.
"We can say, 'Wow this artist has such and such friends or hits, keeps in touch with fans, they have a creative biography, etc.' You really create litmus test for how the artist approaches their career," he said.
But lately, scouts have had to learn to detect a faked space. As they monitor bands' friends, page hits, song plays and comments, certain inconsistencies can be indicators of outside intervention.
The first step Mike Kvidera, director of online marketing for Music Nation, an offshoot of Epic records, takes when he clicks on the page of a band that he's interested in is to look at who their friends are.
"It can't be all porno chicks," he said. He sifts through the first few pages of their friend list to make sure that no more than half of their friends are partially nude in their photos. If the friends seem legit, the next step is to check the numbers.
According to Kvidera, the number of friends shouldn't jump dramatically in one day, like say an increase of more than 500 friends. This is usually a sign that the band has bought a friend-generating robot like Adder Badder or Friendstorm, which automatically send out thousands of friend requests daily.
For $149, Mysocialmarketing.com promises between 3,000 and 6,000 new friends in a week. According to the site: "It's quickly becoming common knowledge that many major labels will not consider a band on MySpace unless they have at least 25,000 song plays!"
While the number of song plays can be an important indicator of popularity, Kvidera must make sure there is a correlation between page views, friends and song plays. The figures should roughly work out so that a band has three times as many page views as friends, and about half as many song plays as page views, according to Kvidera. If these numbers are way off balance, one might suspect that Mysocialmarketing.com's mass-messaging services -- which offers to increase page views and song plays up 100,000 for $1,499 -- or a similar online robot is involved.
"Ideally you want around 4,000 page views, then a minimum of 1,000 plays per song for four songs," he said.
Then there's also the comments to take in to consideration. Brower from Vanguard said he looks for specific, pointed comments as a sign of validity. "You can sense whether there's an artifice to it, if it's a façade," he said. "You look for a large quantity of comments that say 'I really loved this song that you played last night and can't wait for you to come back to our town, etc.'"
Yet for small-time bands outside of the urban markets of New York or L.A., MySpace is often viewed as an opportunity for a more democratic shot at fame. 22-year-old Jason Williams has tried many friend generators to draw attraction to his local Illinois-based band, Lokata.
"I cannot tell you how useful these programs are to someone who does not have a lot of time, as they are working a full time job, managing a band, and promoting it," Williams said in an e-mail. But, he added: "Many times you don't know if you're looking at a real person or one somebody setup to add a lot of friends." Williams now runs the popular "Bot Reviewer" website, which evaluates the latest in friend generating software and services like mysocialnetworking.com.
But these sites are strictly forbidden by the MySpace terms and conditions. The social networking giant monitors the numbers of friend requests users make in a day and "blackholes," or deletes, accounts that seem to be spamming. In turn, many of these "companies" stay small and continuously re-invent their identities and technology. As a potentially safer alternative, some bands turn to image consultants to improve their blogs, photos, and hobby lists.
"It's brilliant brilliant brilliant!," said Dana Nichols, CEO of U-Image Consulting, a company that provides online makeovers for musicians. Nichols, who said she does not condone robotic friend generators, stresses that the MySpace page is perhaps the most important promotion tool a band can have since, nowadays, MySpace pages are often listed ahead of other Web sites in google searches.
"You want to create the image that you're very well-known because, think of it, if you get 10,000 friends, that's 10,000 reciprocal links on one of the most highly-optimized sites on the internet," she said.
While the average MySpace user spends almost two hours on the site, they tend to flip through profiles rapidly, at a rate of about four and a half per minute, according to Nielsen NetRatings. However Nichols said that users will return to the sites of bands who actively update their pages.
Nichols advises many of her clients to create profiles not just on the big social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, but wherever they can, including dating sites like Match.com.
Yet Kvidera says that he has also learned to detect such "managed" sites. In fact, he hopes to find a band lacking some professionalism, in favor of a "grittiness." This way, a group might have the raw material Epic and Music Nation are looking to shape themselves.
"They're just wasting their time with all that," Kvidera said of bands who use image consultants. "Decisions like that should be made between bands, their labels and A&R." Scouts will only be able to keep up with the computer programs and hackers for so long however, Kvidera predicts. Soon, he imagines that MySpace will be useless for talent scouts. Already it is too enormous to sift through all the pages of bands.
Jason Williams says he has recently given up on MySpace, opting to promote his band on the less popular Orkut and Tagworld social networking sites, where he has a greater chance of getting discovered.
Regular MySpace users are also increasingly unhappy with the spamming that has infiltrated their inboxes. According to a study from Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a service that covers trends in online media, consumers reported offense at what they perceive as attempts to advertise for free on their personal pages. Anymore, users routinely deny friend requests from bands they haven't heard, calling it an invasion of privacy when all they really want is their space.
