corigin.com

I had the strange realisation yesterday that, up to this point, nobody has actually asked one of the bands affected by the recent Myspace hacks what THEY thought about the whole situation.

Cue JetKing.

And man, they’re pretty angry.

“Vaughn Atkinson, guitarist with the band JetKing, said he spent a few days trying to get MySpace administrators to restore his band’s page from backup, without success. “It’s messed with a lot of our networking with promoters and venues,” he said in an interview. “It’s important to a band’s credibility … if you have all that data wiped out, you are kind of back to square one in the eyes of people.”

See, this is what people aren’t really considering here - something as silly as a Myspace page actually has some real-world worth, and there is indeed a real-world price to pay because of these mindless hacks. As someone who has a background in music (and yes, a clandestine music involvement to this day) I can tell you that there are a lot of features available to you if you have a band page for networking, promoting, even placing links to all of your upcoming shows via a calendar thingy that takes you to the place where you buy tickets and stuff.

You can do all sorts of things, and it’s actually an extremely useful tool in the upcoming (or even established) artists weaponry.

So you can imagine how angry a lot of these bands are when they’ve gone and built that complex network of friends, people who spread the word about their music, promoters, upcoming shows and a lot more besides and then…….

……whoops. No more Myspace page.

Worse, Myspace then refuse to re-create their profile. Now, this is the standard BS regular users get palmed off with - the old “we can’t do it, sorry “excuse”. Now okay, the regular Myspace user probably doesn’t use their page as an alternative method of generating some income besides regular methods of promotion. So if your page gets hosed and you get lumbered with a big fat “no restore”, then it isn’t the end of the world.

But to slap away a lot of the bands recently hacked with this same garbage is just unacceptable.

Didn’t Myspace UK launch because “Clearly the first place to go is music, so we will tap into the music scene”? But wait, there’s more:

“Hopefully they’ll want to market through Myspace and we’ll tap into the local events scene, parties, clubs, artists, film makers, television producers, so I think it’s going to grow pretty rapidly”.

Huh. Well call me crazy, but I can’t see many people in the UK music industry - or any other industry, for that matter - sticking around on Myspace very long when they’re treated like crap. ALL the bands recently hacked, regardless of point of origin, have been handled poorly with hopeless support mails, pleas for help ignored and no action taken against the people doing this because “You need a subpoena!!”

Whatever. I’ve said repeatedly that this “Get lost, bands” approach is going to generate a fair amount of bad feeling and, you know, I think I have a valid point here. Time for another JetKing quote:

“Vaughn said he and other musicians were unhappy that MySpace had been unable to restore their profiles. “Everyone’s resigned themselves to the fact that MySpace has done absolutely nothing,” he said. “I’m sure if we were a big band like Coldplay or Michael Jackson, they’d have done it in five minutes.”

….well, the warning signs are there, Myspace. I just wonder if anyone is listening.…more