For me souncloud seems to be all the rave now at the moment. But....I really cant understand people who have abandoned myspace as I prefer it's format to soundclouds format. It's really upsetting to see it just die with no reasonable explanation for it ( at least none that I know of ).

When I visit my myspace page it looks cooler than my soundcloud page and it's like my own mini site that looks more welcoming than souncloud. But hey as musicians we gotta follow whats going on in the now eh?

Any idea why myspace has just died?

Stephen

Well, firstly it was about how spammy the bands got, but in the name of improvements, they made the site so much harder to use that most folks simply gave up. Worse yet, the pages started taking ages to load, though in large part, the bands themselves were responsible for that, in posting too many videos and incorporating too much Flash. In fairness, some things did get easier; you no longer need an external Myspace editor to customize your site's look, but a lot of flexibility is gone, in the bargain. There's a post here somewhere asking how to post songs to Myspace for free download, and I tried to look for an answer, but there doesn't seem to be any way to do that anymore. In short, feature bloat crowded out the one thing musicians needed the site for.

I used to be on myspace all the time but when they overhauled it I found the changes made the site almost un-navigable. It's horrible now! If I go on there (on the rare occasion I do) I find it really irritating for so many reasons. I was on a friend's playlist a couple of weeks ago and after his song played it suddenly randomly switched to some godawful MOR sh*te from out of nowhere so I had to abandon ship.

I generally go on YouTube for new music these days.

Mark

Just being slow. Myspace was the slowest and most frustrating thing to load - especially if someone had "customized" their page.

I second the sentiment about the spammy stuff. if you get all kinds of mail from "myspace artists" and such, then pretty soon you are going to never be going to your inbox. that's how it was for me. same with event invites. If I am not in the same state as the person inviting, am I going to make the gig? not likely. Its going the same way with Facebook events, but IMO Facebook has other redeeming qualities. Like they haven't resorted to spamming all the members with internal news mail about facebook artists blah blah blah.

again, IMO, it seems like those sites where customization is impossible seem to exist for a different and more functional purpose. Like I have never seen a customized Soundcloud page, but its pretty functional for displaying and searching for music, is mobile compatible, HTML5 compatible, and can be incorporated into a separate standalone website. In other words, all the things that Myspace wasn't at the time I closed my accounts.

Reverbnation has similar attributes as it can be (or used to be, haven't checked for a bit) incorporated into a player on a standalone website. And it doesn't seem to be really customizable (except for the embed-able player), which I think is an advantage. Arguably putting the focus back on the content. Not the look.

my 2 cents.

They were victims of their own success. Their architecture wouldn't support the huge amount of traffic they started to have and when they finally fixed it - breaking a lot of their best features doing so - people had already moved on.

Was wondering what your experience is with Broadjam? Has it fallen from favor too?


Judy

That's a major complaint for me as well; if I forget to turn off their "improved" player, all my Facebook friends get notified about how much I'm enjoying Chad Kroeger's whinging and moaning. Bad enough, they're making me listen to the first three seconds, but that's just unconscionable. Myspace has never been good at listening to user complaints; I only leave the site up so potential listeners can find me; their SEO is still among the best.

I agree with the bunch. Too slow and too spammy. Not enough incentive to use it compared to the competition, either. I can't imagine busy people in the music industry have time to deal with those issues..

Hey, that was my song!

Stuart

Stuart[/quote]

Ha ha! No, I'm pretty sure it was Nickelback or something equally execrable.

(Sorry to any Nickelback fans looking in... I guess they do have a few out there.)

Mark

It's not Soundcloud that replaced MySpace. Facebook was the MySpace killer. FB is a cleaner platform with way more apps, tools and plugins. It's faster, cleaner, sleeker and more developer-friendly. Facebook does (or can do) everything MySpace does, and more, except better. So of course everyone left MS