After 5 years of a frustrating and largely unsatisfying relationship with MySpace, it is time to give it up.

As an artist or band that takes itself even just a little seriously, this is not a small move. Even though many of my fellow artists feel the way I do about MySpace, they hold on - for what reason, I am not sure. Some still think that it is a critical presence if you are trying to get signed or if you want to have a place for bloggers and other publicity channels to check you out and share your sound with the world.

I have my doubts about whether labels use MySpace as some sort of popularity measure. Perhaps a few do but I can’t see it as wise when there are a ton of bot and spam tools bands can use to inflate their friend lists and play counts. At most, I could see a label perhaps judging how serious a band is by how much effort they put into the look and feel of their online presence, including but not limited to MySpace. But, that’s less about MySpace and more about a band’s overall marketing concept and brand image. Personally, I think no place is more important for online presence than a band’s official home page. For many bands MySpace was their only home page, which may explain a lot of the attachment here. For LowHero.DLL that’s not the case. I have an official site at my own domain that I am very happy with. It is the first thing that comes up if I Google the band name. I own 100% of the copyright on the content and I can make it look however I want.

The new facebook-like feel is not only bland and uninspired but also not even really as facebook-like as it probably should be. It is more like a facebook page that’s been invaded by a bunch of Ukrainian hackers. As an artist, the first thing I want to see when I log in and go to my profile is, well, myself and my stuff. Instead I see an endless stream of spam from all the thousands of bands who “friended” LowHero.DLL over the years. I used to like the way my MySpace page looked after my many hours of custom programming. I received all sorts of compliments and it coordinated well with the look of the official site. All that work was erased in an instant when MySpace changed format. My graphically rich yet easily navigated and useful MySpace implementation suddenly looked like a Walmart tablecloth. I can’t imagine how an artist felt if they actually paid someone to design and set up their MySpace page. MySpace tried to cushion the pain of the loss by tauting the virtues of the new, spartan, configurable (but not really customizable) pallet. It’s a clean slate … a great opportunity to streamline my MySpace presence,  which is exactly what I am going to do … achieve streamlining perfection.

After all, there is nothing more streamlined than nothing.

I held on for a little while thinking I’d maybe try to put some work into it but I just am never there. So, all that was left was the RSS feed from the MySpace blog. It currently feeds to the news reels on my other music sharing sites and most importantly the GLIM Records label site. It allowed me to have a feed without having to build one for the official site.

Thanks to Tumblr, I can fully turn the lights out on MySpace. All news updates for LowHero.DLL will now be posted to my tumblr, which will populate to the official site as well as the other places where I share my music. If you have a tumblr account and are a LowHero.DLL fan, perhaps you’ll follow and make me feel good about committing MySpace Hari Kari.