Musicians have to have a Myspace page. It’s not optional. And it has to be at least halfway decent, because people are going to look for you there. Getting booked means a lot of schmoozing with other musicians, schmoozing with musicians means friending a bunch of bands on Myspace, and friending means that people go to your page.
And you need other social network identies as well. The more social networks you can manage, the more distribution you’ll get and the more presence you’ll have.
You can’t do a decent job on a Myspace profile without steady maintenance. You can’t do a decent job on *any* network without steady maintenance.
So what’s a player to do? My solution on Myspace is to trim everything dynamic out of my profile. For comments, friend lists, and messaging I link to in-network pages that are generated by the server. For blog posts I link to off-network blogs that I own and can point to from other social networks as well. For music I embed a Flash player which uses a playlist that I can load from other social networks.
Check it out: the zero-maintenance but always fresh Myspace page.
Unquestionably the cleanest page on all of Myspace.
Your page looks nice.
I have to say I deleted my MySpace account a few months ago. I don’t think it’s a must. Nothing is a must in life. For most people MySpace might be great, but for me having my own blog is far more important. My own blog gives me an income, MySapce not. I had hundreds of contacts.
I keep remembering that old mp3.com story. Same can happen to MySpace or anything else you can not control.
I tried to keep a balance between owning my identity and being able to use Myspace for networking.
About clean design on myspace, it ain’t easy. :)
Marco, I think that deleting your page completely is a better solution than what I was doing before, which was to have a half-assed profile. With this layout I’m keeping the ability to friend people, which is really useful in the LA music world. Myspace originally established itself among LA musicians, and it’s still a dominant force. I also have an easy path to my music offsite in a location that I own. So hopefully this is a good compromise.