The Devil Has a MySpace Page

By Fringe Staff

By Charlie Hanks

A little over a year ago while I was on maternity leave and my band was working on new songs, a nuclear bomb hit the band and myself. It was slow yet devastating, via dial up. After three years of networking, booking shows, and uploading songs to our myspace page, it was deleted.

At first I though someone hacked it. I emailed Myspace’s customer service twice and never received a response.

Fuming with frustration at losing over two thousand five hundred friends and all the contacts we had made over three years, I started another account. Twenty four hours later, it was deleted. I e-mailed customer service again and still didn’t get a response. We didn’t break any of their rules/standards so I requested a legitimate reason for our account to be deleted again.

With no response and no idea why we kept getting deleted. I tried again to start up a new account. Twenty four hours later, the same freaking thing. At that point I was beyond furious, and hormonal.

I did a search on Myspace to see if some of the other bands with Bipolar in their name were having the same problem. A month prior, there were three pages of bands with Bipolar in their names, We were, however, the first Bipolar that registered with Myspace and had the cool URL to prove it. Then, after all the drama there was one.

One band in New York with the name Bipolar popped up after my search. Only being on the site for less than a year, I knew they had some hand in our page being deleted. I had an insticnt it had something to do with them trying to claim rights to a name we had held since late 2002. I called them. Left an angry voice mail, letting them know who they were screwing with and what proof I had of us using and recording under the name for the past 5 years.

I then started a new account. That account is still going strong.

This whole ordeal made me realize how much of a phenomanom Myspace has been for bands. The site offers networking, exposure, a free web identity, promotion, and community to the bands of the world. Without a Myspace page, your band pretty much doesn’t exist.

However, a band can’t depend just on Myspace as their sole promotion tool. Crap happens that can ruin your sole promotion tool, hackers, crappy bands trying to lay claim to your name, servers crash, etc. If you’re all dependent on a website, and you have a show to promote what are you going to do if that fails??

Here I am bringing this scene a magazine to use as a marketing tool, for networking, exposure, and community. Yet we’re just a sliver of the giant forest at a band’s fingertips.

There are dozens of magazines, thousands of websites, locally driven radio stations, and show promoting outlets besides Myspace.

Get off your asses, make some flyers, attend other bands’ shows to promote your own, make demos to hand out, sticker the world, and support the scene outside of the internet.