Bands And Myspace

Like everyone else on Myspace, I constantly get friend requests from bands and musicians I don’t know and who would never become actual friends with me. My first reaction to this annoyance was to add the following words to my profile:

Note that I do not add bands I haven’t met.

This did not work, though. I continued to get requests from bands, which only proves that these bands have never once read my profile and are just mass emailing out through the system. My next move was simple: I started denying every band arbitrarily. One band, though, then showed the dedication to continue resending the request I was denying, so I until now have just left any new friend requests from bands hanging permanently in the request queue.

Today, though, I got the following email.

you can approove or deny me to be your myspace friend just dont leave me lingering in internet space about it..

If this person weren’t such an utter ass and so self-centered as to seem to me insufferable, I would have just let this slide. Instead, I wrote back with what follows, which I made a point to keep surprisingly unrude, despite the original author’s level of character.

Are you kidding me? You sent me a friend request clearly never having read my profile, which makes a point to state that “I do not add bands I haven’t met.”

The fact is that I don’t deny requests because people will often resend these undesired requests even though I’ve stated clearly I don’t want them. You’re using this service as just a form of advertising and never showed enough interest in me as a person to read my profile once.

So, really think: how dare you give me an attitude when you never paid attention to what I had clearly said about never adding bands or musicians I don’t know personally?

So, if you want, I’ll deny you, but I don’t want to ever see another friend request from you.

- John

I’ve come to a firm conclusion after today’s experience: bands should never be allowed to send friend requests or emails on Myspace. There’s too much exploitation of the service to create what I consider a musical spam system for advertising terrible musicians — I’ve never once seen a real group do something this stupid — to allow it to go on. At the very least, Myspace should create a user-settable option allowing us to filter out all emails and friend requests from those labelled as artists.

If you read this and agree with it, let’s get to work on convincing Myspace.