MySpace: Marketing bonanza for bands.

Byline: Serena Markstrom The Register-Guard

Flanked by his band, Justin King sits at a piano in the middle of a performance hall and lip syncs his song "Bright and Dirty Lights" as a crowd slowly starts to form around the musicians.

As smoke swirls around the floor and people surround the band with tentative, curious looks on their faces, King switches to an electric guitar and the music intensifies. The crowd members jump up and down, pump their arms, laugh and shake their hair around.

King and his band are shooting a video to promote their music, and part of how they got the volunteer extras into Agate Hall for the crowd scene was posting notice of the open video shoot on a MySpace.com bulletin.

"We just wanted to do something kind of moody along the themes of the song, about being a little lost and detached - to convey a little bit of ambiguity and some doubt," says the band's drummer, Nadir Jeevanjee, 27.

Attracting people to a video shoot is one way bands use MySpace.com to connect with fans and promote themselves. They also use it to inform people about upcoming shows, announce radio appearances, list equipment for sale, and post auditions and other news.

MySpace links to online stores, helps recruit people into fan clubs, provides a service that can set any song as a ring tone and promotes a wide variety of music-related services, such as design and photography work. Of course, users also can post blogs, videos and photos.

Like the extras in King's video approaching his piano, people have flocked to the site without knowing fully what it's all about. They often enjoy it once they arrive, although some do so begrudgingly.

According to Websearch .com, MySpace.com is second only to Yahoo.com in overall Web traffic. Its closest competitor as a social networking site is Facebook.com, at No. 10.

Other Web sites may have more total visitors. But My- Space has the traffic, which means eyes on the page, which means mega-advertising dollars and a business model that keeps the site free for users.

Like MySpace, Facebook offers networking among groups of friends and the ability to link with friends of friends. But users say no site compares to MySpace when it comes to connecting musicians to new fans and helping them stay connected to old ones.

"I know I like it because I can relate to the fans one on one," says Tim McLaughlin, who leads the band Eleven Eyes and keeps up the band's My- Space presence. "I chat with them for a minute. They seem to appreciate that."

Local musicians interviewed for this story report spending anywhere from 15 minutes to four hours a day on MySpace, depending on whether they are in tour mode or actively plugging an album.

Matt Jager is a senior in music production at Oregon State University. His band, Sweater Club, has been on MySpace for about two years.

Without the aid of software programs that bulk up numbers, Jager says the band has amassed more than 7,500 "friends" - other users he is linked to directly so that each time he posts a bulletin, it shows up on their pages.

"When we started out, it didn't really impact us a lot because MySpace wasn't as mainstream as it is now," Jager says. "It's like the main tool we use for everything now. That's how, this last tour, we booked pretty much all our shows.

`The use of it has gone from a little profile thing to just everything."

Online tool, real-world links

If there is a cooperative booking person at a venue, bands have found they no longer need to mail press kits to line up shows.

Most local venues - including Sam Bond's Garage, Diablo's/Downtown Lounge and the WOW Hall - maintain their own MySpace presences. The venues use them to list upcoming shows, communicate with customers and even negotiate pay using MySpace's e-mail function.

But even those without a personal account can visit a musician's site and listen to up to four songs, read bios and blogs, watch video and, based on posted comments, see how engaged their fans are. Right there for anyone to see are such tidbits as the last time a person logged in, how many times a "profile" has been viewed and how many "friends" they have.

Profile views and friends may seem meaningless terms to those outside the MySpace realm, but publicity people use them like chart or sales statistics to tout a band's popularity in press bios.

Take this example from a release announcing Lady Sovereign's fall tour:

`She still personally manages her own page and communicates directly with close to 63,000 friends on MySpace, which has logged over 705,000 profile views, and generated more than 1.9 million plays on `Love Me or Hate Me.' '

By the time the London garage rapper and electronica artist had wrapped up her U.S. tour in December, her friends list had jumped to almost 115,000, and her songs had been played nearly 5 million times.

MySpace started less than three years ago when Tom Anderson, a Santa Monica, Calif., musician with a film degree, had the idea to start a site where musicians could post music and fans could chat about it. (Yep, that Tom, your first friend when you open an account.)

The music component's effectiveness as a marketing tool didn't take off immediately. But as more and more people have come on board, it's almost taken for granted that if you hear a musician's name, you will be able to find that person on My- Space with a quick search.

Cash-strapped acts, which describes just about every local band, find MySpace saves them money and footwork.

"Our last couple shows have been pretty good proof that it's working," says Darrell Jolliff, 30, of Eugene rock band Grynch.

Jolliff notes that before he got into MySpace, one of Grynch's weekday shows at the WOW Hall might attract 100 people, but recent shows have been bigger. A Thursday concert in late November drew 300 people, he says.

Grynch had a page up in 2005, but the band wasn't active on it until this year.

"We started noticing that more and more people were contacting us through My- Space," Jolliff says. `We thought, `We should start taking advantage of this.'

`Anytime you get a chance to promote your band for free, I don't see how there's any disadvantage.'

Criticisms minimal

MySpace is still young, and analysts are divided on whether it will have the staying power to have a permanent influence on the music industry.

MySpace has generated its own celebrities, such as Jeffree Star, who was a relatively unknown artist outside of California before MySpace but now has one of the most-added profiles. It's been viewed more than 14 million times, just 2 million shy of Justin Timberlake's number.

The most common negative that users express about the site is a sense of impending doom - that maybe MySpace is too good to be true and is going to be yanked away quicker than it arrived on the scene.

"I just wonder how long it's going to last," McLaughlin, of Eleven Eyes, says, noting he's heard of people creating duplicate accounts in case something were to happen to one of them. MySpace deletes profiles when it gets reports of copyrighted material being improperly used, as well as for other rule violations.

When Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp. bought My- Space for $580 million last year, people worried that the site would change for the worse or that they'd be charged to use it. So far, the site's founders have stayed in charge, and nothing has changed dramatically.

"MySpace is interesting as it's taken off, but is a real non-user friendly application," says local graphic designer Brian Hahn, 47, who does promotional materials for local bands and clubs. "I think the younger crowd, who teethed on a mouse, have no problem with it, however.

"The first thing you see is not intuitive," Hahn says in an Instant Messenger interview. "If you want to customize, you need to go out and find an outside Web site to help you do it.

`It seems like there's no one at the helm, and the whole thing was set up bare bones, and what it has become is the product of users' imagination and inge- nuity."

Anderson and co-founder Chris DeWolfe have been quoted as saying that their success is overwhelming. They never expected to out-traffic Google and eBay within the first two years of existence.

Most of the problems users say they have with MySpace have less to do with the site and more with the way it takes away their time or attracts the wrong kind of attention.

Autumn Lascurain, 25, of the Bend band Autumn & Empire, combs through her friends list and deletes those who post offensive material such as "nudie" pictures or weird comments.

"I never accept requests that seem impersonal," she says. "I actually want to know the people who are my friends."

Jager, of Sweater Club, finds it troubling when young girls profess their love to him and say how cute he is, but admit to never having heard his music.

McLaughlin says a fan once messaged him at 10 a.m. wondering why he hadn't posted a happy birthday message in her comments section yet.

A free-lance music instructor who also uses the site to keep in contact with students, McLaughlin bemoans the ever-present temptation the site presents to students.

"It's a huge time-suck," he says. "I have students who've said they didn't have a chance to practice, but they were on MySpace all day."

Real friends come to shows

Probably more than any site, MySpace has changed the way people interact. It's blurred the lines between online and real-life worlds.

Take University of Oregon education student Josh Carlton, who attended Justin King's video shoot. Carlton had seen King play in Arizona a couple of times and added him to his friends thereafter.

Carlton says he checks My- Space a couple of times a week to see whether bands he likes have posted announcements. When he saw the announcement for the video shoot, he thought it sounded fun and brought a few friends.

The friends hadn't heard of King before. But after hearing his music, they counted themselves fans.

King has a major label record deal with Epic, but produced the video independently. With an industrywide lack of emphasis on artist development, even contracted artists are compelled to take the management of their careers into their own hands, and MySpace is a key tool in helping them spread their music.

Sweater Club's Jager says his band hasn't achieved huge success because of MySpace, but he's sure it is further along than it would have been without the site.

"The social networks are just so far-reaching," he says.

Jager says he's sold CDs all over the country. If he weren't sold out of the latest pressing, he would be selling even more because people keep messaging him orders.

"It does work, but it's pretty dependent on the amount of time you put into it."

Jager, 21, has cut back his My- Space use in recent months. He still appreciates the site, but certain aspects of it give him pause.

"It's so overwhelming," he says. "There's so much coming at you from everywhere. I don't see how it's going to continue.

`It seems like we're going to reach a point of sensory overload. It's a tool we need to use to increase our success as a band, but it's not taking us (as a culture) to a place where we can be happy."

You can call Serena Markstrom at 338-2371 or e-mail her at [e-mail].