Thou Shalt Always Kill
Bobby “Boris” Pickett

Interesting E-Mail

From: Khalid Nurredin
Subject: In Case You Didn’t Know!

Bob,
 
This is how Tila Tequila and a lot of other people with huge amounts of friends got them on Myspace. He promises 100,000 views and listens for $1500.00. If a group or artist has a large enough budget, he gets them 100,000 sets of eyeballs every month,with most becoming a friend. This explains why Tila has almost 2 million friends, but only moved 13,000 singles on Itunes. Most acts use companies like this to trick a major label into thinking they have a large fan base, but miniscule sales always are a result. There are others like him, but he’s considered to be the best. Anybody with the cash can get a lot of "friends" but it doesn’t mean squat if the quality of the music isn’t there. So the next time you visit a page, you have to wonder are these really fans or were they just bought? Somebody with some deep pockets is backing Tila, but they forgot about good songs sung well. I don’t know if this strategy will work for someone who is truly talented. We’ll just have to wait and see. I wonder if the majors are doing the same thing? I heard a rumour that J records did this with Paula Deanda, but I have no proof, and her sales are about as bad as Tila’s with all that money from BMG.
 
Peace,
 
Khalid

My Social Marketing
 

From: Mark Hinkley

Last night I was at a soccer game and they were playing a Toronto-based band called BTK’s (and rap-rock ensemble) "big hit" called Peppyrock.  The problem with this is that I’ve heard the song more now that the band has completely vanished off of the musical landscape.  Their music has been featured in many a beer commercial.

A group called The Ernies (from VA, rock-ska with turntablism) which I first heard from the first Tony Hawk video game about 8 years ago, has received more radio play in the last 3 years than they did when they were signed to Mojo Records and released their sophmore disc "Meson Ray".  I’ve heard their clips in commercials for Ford trucks, trailers for The Hulk movie, and in bumpers for wrestling programming.

So my questions to you are : How is it a band gets dropped for not being marketable or making enough money, but magically become worth money long after they’re "dead"?  Also, what are the chances that these artists are seeing dime-one from any of this filler/muzak-esque airtime?

From: Rob Falk
Subject: Take a look at this Geffen Records deal!

Bob:

You’ve got to see this: Bratz

Click on the "Click Here" button and read the terms of the agreement. In exchange for having your songs listened to by "Top A&R execs at Geffen" you give Geffen the right to use your music, anywhere, for any purpose, forever!

You might also get a record deal, which appears to cut Geffen in on touring income.

Un-effin’-believable!

From: Noah Blackstein
Subject: True story

One month ago. My wife’s truck got broken into. The assholes stole my kids strollers and the car manual. They left 20 CD’s.

By: bob | 2007/04/26 | Music Business | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]

13 Responses to Interesting E-Mail »»


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  1. Linda Strawberry
    Comment by Linda Strawberry | 2007/04/28 at 13:20:12

    That email about tila tequila is filled with errors. I have the business saying this because I’m her best friend and a fellow artists with a working brain who reads you letters every single day. She is one of the hardest working girls around. She turned down major label offers and decided to do it herself to start thinking in a new way. She is an independent fierce individual. As far as her sales they were 30,000 and that’s with no promotion except for a week of bulletins on myspace. Her real record comes out this summer. As far as how she got her friends….I can’t answer that but she gets 100,000 page views A DAY. There’s obvious interest that wasn’t paid for. That’s all I have to say about this at the moment.

    Linda Strawberry
    http://Www.myspace.com/strawberry

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  2. Morgan Zuehlke
    Comment by Morgan Zuehlke | 2007/04/28 at 13:20:39

    I don’t know where Khalid got his "information," but he is sorely mistaken. The probable truth: Khalid works for that social marketing company he’s pushing, and is trying to assert that they worked with Tila, solely for the sake of trying to drum up some extra business.

    The HONEST truth of the matter: Tila’s #s are completely organically grown.

    Hi, I’m Morgan. I’m 25 years old, and "web geek" is a title that I wear quite proudly. I’m the New Media gal with Tila’s management company…and I know for a fact that we did not hire anyone relatively close to the likes of the company that you are describing. Based upon "friend ID" numbers over at MySpace, I signed up for my MySpace profile about 10,000 people before Tila did. Why do I tell you this? For the fact that if I, web geek, got so many friends requests for appearing to be relatively nothing special, then it is entirely plausible that Tila’s friends list grew to the size that it currently is all on its own.

    It all started on a couple of little sites called "Live Journal," "Friendster," and "MakeOutClub." We were the first round of college-age kids getting into this whole "social networking" thing, while simultaneously discovering digital photography…and "holy crap, we can suddenly make ourselves look purty on the internet." Social networking provided us all the opportunity to either show the world who we "really" are, or show the world who we at least fancied ourselves to be…and it was all shiny and brand new. There was no "SPAM" and there were not thousands and millions of crappy emo bands trying to get you to check out the latest recording to come out of their bathrooms/bedrooms/basements. There were real people to discover, and everyone hunted around freely exploring each others’ profiles instead of staying put on their own.

    Moving over to MySpace.com, all of the early adopters were curious in that fashion. I had up some cute artsy pictures with rockabilly hair and makeup, and I was getting friends requests right and left…thousands of them. It was like that when it first started…and Tila….well, Tila didn’t have to try to make herself seem any way… the truth is, she’s hot. She’s freakin’ hot, and she was one of the first people up there to actually look like a celebrity. She looked like a magazine ad… But this was an interactive magazine ad. Nobody could figure it out. I remember finding her profile shortly after I signed up, and thinking "Is this for real? This has to be fake." I was curious! Everyone was curious. Tila knew how to exploit that. She knew how to put her good looks to good use, and she did it ALL BY HERSELF.

    For a long time, there was no customizable "Top 8." The top 8 was, by default, the top 8 people on your friends list who had been on MySpace the longest. So, for many people just signing up to MySpace, when they visited their friends pages, they saw Tom and Tila up there on every profile belonging to someone who was trying to figure out how some hot-bodied celeb-looking girl had the time to take care of a MySpace profile so diligently…and when you get to see the same profile picture on enough profiles, you gotta check it out further! So, even more people visited Tila’s profile….and it grew VIRALLY.

    By the time that the Top 8 became customizable, it was too late… Tila was already second only to Tom when it came to #s of friends. She started getting media attention, calling her the "Queen of MySpace." When the media calls you that, people visit your profile. The more attention it generates, the more people visit her profile! It’s bound to happen! The more time progresses, the more friends requests Tila gets…it grows and it grows.

    Khalid, you can kiss Tila’s rear end. That girl deserves every ounce of credit for building up this number on her own. To put it in perspective: she APPROVED every single one of those friends requests herself. No assistant, no help, no hired guns…she did it all…and she still does.

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  3. Geoff Harrison
    Comment by Geoff Harrison | 2007/04/28 at 13:20:59

    I’ve been laughing at some of these bands for the past year who have 30,000 friends and you see that they only have like 200 listens in a day, then you look at their comments and all of them are "Thanks for the add". You then look at their profile views and it’s at 33,000 and overall listens is at 34,000. You know what that says to me, they’ve got a whole bunch of manufactured b.s. and their spending their times building an illusion versus actually building a fan base.

    The band I manage has a "paltry" 4300 friends compared to a lot of bands on Myspace, BUT we’ve done zero outbound marketing on the site, we let fans come to us, last year we were getting ~100 new friend requests a month, (1/2 from bands doing what I was speaking of above and 1/2 real fans), now we’re up to 400 new friend requests per month with the majority being real people who when I go to their pages listen to "real music".

    We’re now getting 150 – 300 listens a day (last year we were at 50 – 100), which still leaves numbers to be desired compared to larger national acts (and Myspace spammer bands) but if you’ll notice we’ve got about an 8 to 1 "views to friend" ratio which says to me that each of our friends has come back over and over again, also we’ve got a 15 to 1 plays to friends ratio and 1.8 to 1 listens to views ratio which says to me that everytime someone comes to my page they are listening to almost 2 of our songs and friends are coming back to listen over and over.

    Anyways, just wanted to let you into my metric filled mind and how I use Myspace as a true indicator for growth.

    Sincerely,
    Geoff
    .:.::.::.::.::.::.::.::.
    Geoff Harrison
    JamBase Sales
    http://www.jambase.com
    GSH Music Management
    http://www.backyardtirefire.com

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  4. Anon
    Comment by Anon | 2007/04/28 at 13:21:15

    Hey Bob,

    I recently worked at an indie where interns sat at computers all day, every day, on myspace and "friended" people for the label’s bands. The company didn’t shell out money for it though, since the interns were unpaid! Why pay lots of money when you’ve got an endless supply of people willing to work for nothing doing menial tasks?

    That being said, I also worked at another indie where interns managed bands myspace accounts and accepted friend requests, never sending any out. The bands on this label weren’t huge but they had talent and a core audience, and were certainly not at a loss for myspace friends. (The interns were a lot happier there too.)

    …If you decide to post this, please don’t put my name. Thanks.

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  5. Shannon Hudson
    Comment by Shannon Hudson | 2007/04/28 at 13:21:33

    Bob,

    This is pretty commonly known among bands/artists. I can also say this from experience with myspace: In October or November of 2005, my band, Come and Go, was a featured artist on the myspace music page. There were no big bucks, and no craziness involved. Someone who worked for myspace had apparently been going to our concerts for years, and decided to feature us. We were on the main music page next to the big guys for 10 days or so. During that time we were flooded with friend requests (somewhere around 3,000), listens (somewhere around 15,000) and messages (who knows how many). Our net sales from this exposure – 2 sales from iTunes (and we are available at pretty much every major retail site on the web). We sold more CD’s on the last show of our tour (20 CD’s to an audience of 100) than we did to 3,000 new "friends" from myspace.

    Now, I know you can attribute this to people not liking the music, and that’s a valid point for anyone to make, but the fact of the matter is that most of the people on myspace that are looking for music are spammers or they are kids without credit cards. Why were cd’s booming like hell? Teenage girls had too much babysitting money, kids hung out at the mall (where the record stores were), and N’Sync was sitting in a huge poster up in front of them to show them where to place their money.

    The majority of messages I got were very sincere about how our music was great, but all of these kids just want to get close to something that they think is "big" or "famous" (of which we are neither, but I’m sure we looked like it to them). What’s my point? Myspace doesn’t sell records, because kids don’t buy records. Period.

    Another thought: I sent out an email to my best 8 friends from college asking them the last time they bought a CD (I graduated in 1999, so we’re talking about 29-31 year olds). NONE of them could even remember, and all of them were SURE they hadn’t bought one in the last year.

    We haven’t just lost a generation of kids, we’ve lost the grunge generation too. And THAT generation was most involved in the peak of the industry. (go figure).

    Regards,

    Shannon Hudson

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  6. Matt Hanrahan
    Comment by Matt Hanrahan | 2007/04/28 at 13:21:48

    Bob,

    Im pretty sure the word these days is that having friends or friend views on myspace is no longer a legit claim. Tila tequila is proof of that for sure, but also the simple factor that things like friend bots exist that you can pay for to have a machine more or less auto dial for friends.

    There was certainly a red hot minute (or two) where you could get some interest from an A&R rep due tot he fact that you had some much action and interest, but those days are over in my book.

    Stupid internet…

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  7. Anon
    Comment by Anon | 2007/04/28 at 13:22:03

    Hi Bob,

    What I find interesting about Myspace and bots to add thousands of friends…

    Is MySpace is quick to send a message to any band who isn’t in there pocket financially.

    And send the band a message stating MySpace will close their accounts because they are adding to many people a day to their friends list, or sending out to many comments.

    A few months ago, last time I looked into this,the daily quota was 400 you were allowed to add to your friends list daily.
    Still somehow.. through the wizards of the MySpace world, these folks are able to by pass the daily quota. By opening multiple user accounts and redirect adding friends to these accounts to the said band accounts.

    Then you have untalented people like Tila Tequila, who is paying someone and MySpace are turning a blind eye up at the office with that amount of friends this account and many others are allowed to add daily.

    We do not run bot on Myspace for our bands, for we want to see how many REAL fans we actually have. I do however know of a few bands that have purchased these bots for MySpace only to receive a nasty message from Myspace saying that "if they were running a bot they would close their accounts." And there for have never used a bot again. Mind you they were only allowed to add about 1,000 friends before they received their nasty gram!

    Seems rather unfair, some bands are allowed to get away with this.
    While the majority of bands can’t afford to employee a team of people with multiple computers and multiple MySpace accounts to do this for them. And then on top of this MySpace says they are suing people inventing these bots??

    Somehow the computer wizards of the MySpace world who are working for the paying bands and some employee’s of MySpace have
    to be in on the payola in order for this to happen. Think about it, why are some MySpace band accounts not receiving Nasty grams from MySpace and other bands are. Because some folks at MySpace have to be financially in on it.

    Please do not use my name.. if you are going to include this information in one of your reply’s.

    All and All these friends figures on MySpace that are high in volume.. you know are Fake with these kind of numbers, especially when its a band with absolutely zero talent.

    Yes it is a trick of the eye.. thank god my brain is still working and I wear glasses!!

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  8. Tom Baggott
    Comment by Tom Baggott | 2007/04/28 at 13:22:18

    I figured there had to be a bunch of geek marketing weasels capitalizing on MySpace somewhere. I had heard of "bots" that send requests for friends, but this is perfect sleazery. Thanks Khalid, for bringing this to our attention, but I have to disagree with your claim that "most acts" use this kind of service. I think (I hope!) that most acts are either unaware of the service, or aware that it would be the end of their cred if they got busted. Or they are likely too broke. You can generally tell when somebody is working the system by the ratio of friends to plays. I look at a lot of MySpace pages and most don’t seem to have the kinds of gross disparities between plays and friends that you point out. I manage an artist (www.myspace.com/ryanmontbleau) who has great play volume– getting close to 500,000– and barely 11,000 friends. I am not saying this to promote my artist, I am using the ratio as an example. The plays are what are important here in my view. These numbers indicate that there is actually a core of fans who either go to Ryan’s page frequently or have linked his music to theirs. The numbers are pretty good, but they are realistic and based on actually having 11,000 FANS on MySpace, not just folks who agreed to become
    "friends" after being spammed… or worse. I think MySpace is a very useful tool in so many ways, and it is the ability to drive traffic to my artist’s website and stay in touch with the fans through the medium that matters to me, not the numbers. I hope people who actually care about MySpace numbers aren’t fooled by the fools out there…

    Tom Baggott- TBArtist Development
    Management: Ryan Montbleau- http://www.ryanmontbleau.com /
    http://www.myspace.com/ryanmontbleau

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  9. NiNi
    Comment by NiNi | 2007/04/28 at 13:22:36

    Bob,

    I totally remember declining Tila Tequila’s friend request.

    -NiNi
    myspace.com/corvo

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  10. Khalid Nurredin
    Comment by Khalid Nurredin | 2007/05/01 at 08:36:35

    I really hate to reply to ignorance, but sometimes it gets so deep I have to put on my boots and reply. I happen to own Vegas Flava Records and don’t work for any marketing company that falsely boosts numbers.

    You can tell by the tastelessness of Morgan’s reply that obviously her mother failed to teach her good manners.

    You can believe b.s. or you can believe Soundscan. If you listened to Tila’s music, you really have to be on crack to think any major A&R listened past the first ten seconds on any cut! I’m not pushing any marketing company, but if you have 2,000,000 hardcore fans, you don’t have a sell-through of 02%!(If she sold 30,000) If I want to pay $1500.00 per month I can get just as many eyeball views. As an analyst I love to get through when someone blatantly lies.

    Let’s just say it only takes 30 seconds to approve a friend’s request. At 2,000,0000 friends you’d have to spend 1 million minutes to do it, which means 16,666 man hours (694 days non-stop) just to approve friends if you didn’t use a robot. The two messages either were sent by Tila or some coked-out flunkies. I don’t like or appreciate it when someone impugns my integrity, but I have to consider the source. What else could you expect from an ex porn star? (and I can email the pictures if anyone wants to say I’m lying)

    So if the 100,000 daily views are real, where are the sales? Check out Anthony Hamilton for example. He has 18,000 friends and is closing on 750,000 units! You’re telling me that she has 36,500,000 daily page views per year and she only moved 30,000 singles?

    Did you even pass 8th grade Algebra? The numbers don’t add up to anything but one big lie! And the song she has on iTunes wasn’t a "real" record? Then what was it, spring training? You had it produced by "Little Jon" but it was just practice?

    The record companies know the extreme numbers on Myspace are boosted. How many friends does Norah Jones have? (no official myspace page) How many units has she moved? And would Ms. Strawberry name each error I made? I’ll debate her point by point on every one. Don’t push it Tila, we’re on to you.I rest my case.

    P.S. When I said "you" I meant Tila’s apologists not you personally. Tila is the musical equivilant of Enron, all hype and no substance. I hope you didn’t take my reply as a personal attack. I was just incensed that someone who doesn’t know me could attack me personally, when the numbers just don’t add up no matter how you work them. You can include this if you’re using my rebuttal.

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  11. Brian L. Klein
    Comment by Brian L. Klein | 2007/05/01 at 08:36:53

    I was asked to put a proposal in to Renshaw’s office to promote Tila’s single online. It was designed to set up the release in a "super distribution" plan that I came up with. I’ve been very successful with this technique with the artist I manage named Joe Purdy. We’ve sold over 250k single downloads worldwide this past year and a half with no label. I’m doing this with all of the artists I manage. I’ve been working with majors and indies for years. I’m done with them. We are actually making money on record royalties this early in the game and reinvesting it!!

    Renshaw’s office decided not to hire me. They fucked up. With the traffic Tila gets every day and her reach she should have done much better. Her music isn’t amazing but neither is a lot of shit that sells. They had one tiny buy button on her front page leading to itunes. NOTHING viral besides the video.

    The reason I was excited to work on the project was her reach. 1.6 million "friends" should have had a bigger impact if executed properly. It was embarrassing to see what happened. They ended up hiring the same old "new media" marketing company every label hires. Her traffic should have been used to create thousands of front doors to her Itunes page. There was NOTHING forward thinking or exciting about what they did.

    I understand where the digital market is headed so don’t respond with anything about Snocap already doing this and music should be free. I get that. Right now it’s all about effort and not what you spend and its about empowering and connecting with your base to help you grow and spread your music. The economics in the digital world do not work for big companies but for now they work for me.

    My artists have never seen income off of record sales at a label unless they’ve recouped and then they earn 12-14%? The way I have it set up is we use the income to market, promote and create and OWN the content. All of Purdys albums stream for free on his website. We now sell 20-35k downloads per month. We release records when we want to and as often as we want to. We measure our own success. For the first time as a manager I don’t have to worry about managing a label’s enthusiasm and I’m having a blast!!

    Joe records an album in 6-8 days. Last year he recorded one in London, Paris and New York. We just recorded on in Scotland 2 weeks ago.

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  12. Anon
    Comment by Anon | 2007/05/01 at 08:37:26

    Anyone saying Tila’s numbers are organic is lying and insulting our intelligence at the same time. Tila used a bot for both friend adding and comment broadcasting. She even openly thanked/advertised for them in the comments. You can find the proof here (Google) by clicking on the cached version of the pages. You will see this comment posted by Tila Tequila:

    hey just a test for a little program I got to

    message all my friends. So now everyone

    can get a comment from me 🙂

    the program is over here:

    http://www.silentproducts.cjb.net kisses

    More on that here (http://web.archive.org/web/20060423165114/http://www.silent-products.com/) as well. The use of bots for comment broadcasting on MySpace was against Terms of Service at this time and she should have had her account removed but was given preferential treatment. Kind of similar to the way that Hollywood Undead are still listed in the "Unsigned" category of MySpace’s ranking system and given 8 songs in their player so that they can stomp the smaller bands and stay in the top ten. You may also notice One Republic (Interscope) and Hawthorne Heights (Virgin) in the top ten as "Unsigned". MySpace has lost a lot of the credibility they once had with artists due to their total lack of respect for any band/label who are not paying them. As the person stated in a previous email, MySpace allows major label bands to use bots with no consequence. I have seen the evidence of this firsthand. I see a mass exodus from that site happening in the next year or so.

    On the off chance that you print this please leave my name off as I don’t really feel like having my account deleted should a MySpace employee happen across this…

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  13. John McKay
    Comment by John McKay | 2007/05/01 at 08:37:42

    This might be even worse…

    http://www.mysocialmarketing.com/shop/index.php?categoryID=86

    You can now pay to get profile views and song plays for your band on MySpace. ie: Make-believe fans.

    They make it seem as though you need at least 25,000 views to attract major labels.

    Too bad they can’t clone humans to fill venues.

    John McKay
    Fenton, MI


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  1. Linda Strawberry
    Comment by Linda Strawberry | 2007/04/28 at 13:20:12

    That email about tila tequila is filled with errors. I have the business saying this because I’m her best friend and a fellow artists with a working brain who reads you letters every single day. She is one of the hardest working girls around. She turned down major label offers and decided to do it herself to start thinking in a new way. She is an independent fierce individual. As far as her sales they were 30,000 and that’s with no promotion except for a week of bulletins on myspace. Her real record comes out this summer. As far as how she got her friends….I can’t answer that but she gets 100,000 page views A DAY. There’s obvious interest that wasn’t paid for. That’s all I have to say about this at the moment.

    Linda Strawberry
    http://Www.myspace.com/strawberry

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    1. Morgan Zuehlke
      Comment by Morgan Zuehlke | 2007/04/28 at 13:20:39

      I don’t know where Khalid got his "information," but he is sorely mistaken. The probable truth: Khalid works for that social marketing company he’s pushing, and is trying to assert that they worked with Tila, solely for the sake of trying to drum up some extra business.

      The HONEST truth of the matter: Tila’s #s are completely organically grown.

      Hi, I’m Morgan. I’m 25 years old, and "web geek" is a title that I wear quite proudly. I’m the New Media gal with Tila’s management company…and I know for a fact that we did not hire anyone relatively close to the likes of the company that you are describing. Based upon "friend ID" numbers over at MySpace, I signed up for my MySpace profile about 10,000 people before Tila did. Why do I tell you this? For the fact that if I, web geek, got so many friends requests for appearing to be relatively nothing special, then it is entirely plausible that Tila’s friends list grew to the size that it currently is all on its own.

      It all started on a couple of little sites called "Live Journal," "Friendster," and "MakeOutClub." We were the first round of college-age kids getting into this whole "social networking" thing, while simultaneously discovering digital photography…and "holy crap, we can suddenly make ourselves look purty on the internet." Social networking provided us all the opportunity to either show the world who we "really" are, or show the world who we at least fancied ourselves to be…and it was all shiny and brand new. There was no "SPAM" and there were not thousands and millions of crappy emo bands trying to get you to check out the latest recording to come out of their bathrooms/bedrooms/basements. There were real people to discover, and everyone hunted around freely exploring each others’ profiles instead of staying put on their own.

      Moving over to MySpace.com, all of the early adopters were curious in that fashion. I had up some cute artsy pictures with rockabilly hair and makeup, and I was getting friends requests right and left…thousands of them. It was like that when it first started…and Tila….well, Tila didn’t have to try to make herself seem any way… the truth is, she’s hot. She’s freakin’ hot, and she was one of the first people up there to actually look like a celebrity. She looked like a magazine ad… But this was an interactive magazine ad. Nobody could figure it out. I remember finding her profile shortly after I signed up, and thinking "Is this for real? This has to be fake." I was curious! Everyone was curious. Tila knew how to exploit that. She knew how to put her good looks to good use, and she did it ALL BY HERSELF.

      For a long time, there was no customizable "Top 8." The top 8 was, by default, the top 8 people on your friends list who had been on MySpace the longest. So, for many people just signing up to MySpace, when they visited their friends pages, they saw Tom and Tila up there on every profile belonging to someone who was trying to figure out how some hot-bodied celeb-looking girl had the time to take care of a MySpace profile so diligently…and when you get to see the same profile picture on enough profiles, you gotta check it out further! So, even more people visited Tila’s profile….and it grew VIRALLY.

      By the time that the Top 8 became customizable, it was too late… Tila was already second only to Tom when it came to #s of friends. She started getting media attention, calling her the "Queen of MySpace." When the media calls you that, people visit your profile. The more attention it generates, the more people visit her profile! It’s bound to happen! The more time progresses, the more friends requests Tila gets…it grows and it grows.

      Khalid, you can kiss Tila’s rear end. That girl deserves every ounce of credit for building up this number on her own. To put it in perspective: she APPROVED every single one of those friends requests herself. No assistant, no help, no hired guns…she did it all…and she still does.

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      1. Geoff Harrison
        Comment by Geoff Harrison | 2007/04/28 at 13:20:59

        I’ve been laughing at some of these bands for the past year who have 30,000 friends and you see that they only have like 200 listens in a day, then you look at their comments and all of them are "Thanks for the add". You then look at their profile views and it’s at 33,000 and overall listens is at 34,000. You know what that says to me, they’ve got a whole bunch of manufactured b.s. and their spending their times building an illusion versus actually building a fan base.

        The band I manage has a "paltry" 4300 friends compared to a lot of bands on Myspace, BUT we’ve done zero outbound marketing on the site, we let fans come to us, last year we were getting ~100 new friend requests a month, (1/2 from bands doing what I was speaking of above and 1/2 real fans), now we’re up to 400 new friend requests per month with the majority being real people who when I go to their pages listen to "real music".

        We’re now getting 150 – 300 listens a day (last year we were at 50 – 100), which still leaves numbers to be desired compared to larger national acts (and Myspace spammer bands) but if you’ll notice we’ve got about an 8 to 1 "views to friend" ratio which says to me that each of our friends has come back over and over again, also we’ve got a 15 to 1 plays to friends ratio and 1.8 to 1 listens to views ratio which says to me that everytime someone comes to my page they are listening to almost 2 of our songs and friends are coming back to listen over and over.

        Anyways, just wanted to let you into my metric filled mind and how I use Myspace as a true indicator for growth.

        Sincerely,
        Geoff
        .:.::.::.::.::.::.::.::.
        Geoff Harrison
        JamBase Sales
        http://www.jambase.com
        GSH Music Management
        http://www.backyardtirefire.com

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        1. Anon
          Comment by Anon | 2007/04/28 at 13:21:15

          Hey Bob,

          I recently worked at an indie where interns sat at computers all day, every day, on myspace and "friended" people for the label’s bands. The company didn’t shell out money for it though, since the interns were unpaid! Why pay lots of money when you’ve got an endless supply of people willing to work for nothing doing menial tasks?

          That being said, I also worked at another indie where interns managed bands myspace accounts and accepted friend requests, never sending any out. The bands on this label weren’t huge but they had talent and a core audience, and were certainly not at a loss for myspace friends. (The interns were a lot happier there too.)

          …If you decide to post this, please don’t put my name. Thanks.

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          1. Shannon Hudson
            Comment by Shannon Hudson | 2007/04/28 at 13:21:33

            Bob,

            This is pretty commonly known among bands/artists. I can also say this from experience with myspace: In October or November of 2005, my band, Come and Go, was a featured artist on the myspace music page. There were no big bucks, and no craziness involved. Someone who worked for myspace had apparently been going to our concerts for years, and decided to feature us. We were on the main music page next to the big guys for 10 days or so. During that time we were flooded with friend requests (somewhere around 3,000), listens (somewhere around 15,000) and messages (who knows how many). Our net sales from this exposure – 2 sales from iTunes (and we are available at pretty much every major retail site on the web). We sold more CD’s on the last show of our tour (20 CD’s to an audience of 100) than we did to 3,000 new "friends" from myspace.

            Now, I know you can attribute this to people not liking the music, and that’s a valid point for anyone to make, but the fact of the matter is that most of the people on myspace that are looking for music are spammers or they are kids without credit cards. Why were cd’s booming like hell? Teenage girls had too much babysitting money, kids hung out at the mall (where the record stores were), and N’Sync was sitting in a huge poster up in front of them to show them where to place their money.

            The majority of messages I got were very sincere about how our music was great, but all of these kids just want to get close to something that they think is "big" or "famous" (of which we are neither, but I’m sure we looked like it to them). What’s my point? Myspace doesn’t sell records, because kids don’t buy records. Period.

            Another thought: I sent out an email to my best 8 friends from college asking them the last time they bought a CD (I graduated in 1999, so we’re talking about 29-31 year olds). NONE of them could even remember, and all of them were SURE they hadn’t bought one in the last year.

            We haven’t just lost a generation of kids, we’ve lost the grunge generation too. And THAT generation was most involved in the peak of the industry. (go figure).

            Regards,

            Shannon Hudson

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            1. Matt Hanrahan
              Comment by Matt Hanrahan | 2007/04/28 at 13:21:48

              Bob,

              Im pretty sure the word these days is that having friends or friend views on myspace is no longer a legit claim. Tila tequila is proof of that for sure, but also the simple factor that things like friend bots exist that you can pay for to have a machine more or less auto dial for friends.

              There was certainly a red hot minute (or two) where you could get some interest from an A&R rep due tot he fact that you had some much action and interest, but those days are over in my book.

              Stupid internet…

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              1. Anon
                Comment by Anon | 2007/04/28 at 13:22:03

                Hi Bob,

                What I find interesting about Myspace and bots to add thousands of friends…

                Is MySpace is quick to send a message to any band who isn’t in there pocket financially.

                And send the band a message stating MySpace will close their accounts because they are adding to many people a day to their friends list, or sending out to many comments.

                A few months ago, last time I looked into this,the daily quota was 400 you were allowed to add to your friends list daily.
                Still somehow.. through the wizards of the MySpace world, these folks are able to by pass the daily quota. By opening multiple user accounts and redirect adding friends to these accounts to the said band accounts.

                Then you have untalented people like Tila Tequila, who is paying someone and MySpace are turning a blind eye up at the office with that amount of friends this account and many others are allowed to add daily.

                We do not run bot on Myspace for our bands, for we want to see how many REAL fans we actually have. I do however know of a few bands that have purchased these bots for MySpace only to receive a nasty message from Myspace saying that "if they were running a bot they would close their accounts." And there for have never used a bot again. Mind you they were only allowed to add about 1,000 friends before they received their nasty gram!

                Seems rather unfair, some bands are allowed to get away with this.
                While the majority of bands can’t afford to employee a team of people with multiple computers and multiple MySpace accounts to do this for them. And then on top of this MySpace says they are suing people inventing these bots??

                Somehow the computer wizards of the MySpace world who are working for the paying bands and some employee’s of MySpace have
                to be in on the payola in order for this to happen. Think about it, why are some MySpace band accounts not receiving Nasty grams from MySpace and other bands are. Because some folks at MySpace have to be financially in on it.

                Please do not use my name.. if you are going to include this information in one of your reply’s.

                All and All these friends figures on MySpace that are high in volume.. you know are Fake with these kind of numbers, especially when its a band with absolutely zero talent.

                Yes it is a trick of the eye.. thank god my brain is still working and I wear glasses!!

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                1. Tom Baggott
                  Comment by Tom Baggott | 2007/04/28 at 13:22:18

                  I figured there had to be a bunch of geek marketing weasels capitalizing on MySpace somewhere. I had heard of "bots" that send requests for friends, but this is perfect sleazery. Thanks Khalid, for bringing this to our attention, but I have to disagree with your claim that "most acts" use this kind of service. I think (I hope!) that most acts are either unaware of the service, or aware that it would be the end of their cred if they got busted. Or they are likely too broke. You can generally tell when somebody is working the system by the ratio of friends to plays. I look at a lot of MySpace pages and most don’t seem to have the kinds of gross disparities between plays and friends that you point out. I manage an artist (www.myspace.com/ryanmontbleau) who has great play volume– getting close to 500,000– and barely 11,000 friends. I am not saying this to promote my artist, I am using the ratio as an example. The plays are what are important here in my view. These numbers indicate that there is actually a core of fans who either go to Ryan’s page frequently or have linked his music to theirs. The numbers are pretty good, but they are realistic and based on actually having 11,000 FANS on MySpace, not just folks who agreed to become
                  "friends" after being spammed… or worse. I think MySpace is a very useful tool in so many ways, and it is the ability to drive traffic to my artist’s website and stay in touch with the fans through the medium that matters to me, not the numbers. I hope people who actually care about MySpace numbers aren’t fooled by the fools out there…

                  Tom Baggott- TBArtist Development
                  Management: Ryan Montbleau- http://www.ryanmontbleau.com /
                  http://www.myspace.com/ryanmontbleau

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                  1. NiNi
                    Comment by NiNi | 2007/04/28 at 13:22:36

                    Bob,

                    I totally remember declining Tila Tequila’s friend request.

                    -NiNi
                    myspace.com/corvo

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                    1. Khalid Nurredin
                      Comment by Khalid Nurredin | 2007/05/01 at 08:36:35

                      I really hate to reply to ignorance, but sometimes it gets so deep I have to put on my boots and reply. I happen to own Vegas Flava Records and don’t work for any marketing company that falsely boosts numbers.

                      You can tell by the tastelessness of Morgan’s reply that obviously her mother failed to teach her good manners.

                      You can believe b.s. or you can believe Soundscan. If you listened to Tila’s music, you really have to be on crack to think any major A&R listened past the first ten seconds on any cut! I’m not pushing any marketing company, but if you have 2,000,000 hardcore fans, you don’t have a sell-through of 02%!(If she sold 30,000) If I want to pay $1500.00 per month I can get just as many eyeball views. As an analyst I love to get through when someone blatantly lies.

                      Let’s just say it only takes 30 seconds to approve a friend’s request. At 2,000,0000 friends you’d have to spend 1 million minutes to do it, which means 16,666 man hours (694 days non-stop) just to approve friends if you didn’t use a robot. The two messages either were sent by Tila or some coked-out flunkies. I don’t like or appreciate it when someone impugns my integrity, but I have to consider the source. What else could you expect from an ex porn star? (and I can email the pictures if anyone wants to say I’m lying)

                      So if the 100,000 daily views are real, where are the sales? Check out Anthony Hamilton for example. He has 18,000 friends and is closing on 750,000 units! You’re telling me that she has 36,500,000 daily page views per year and she only moved 30,000 singles?

                      Did you even pass 8th grade Algebra? The numbers don’t add up to anything but one big lie! And the song she has on iTunes wasn’t a "real" record? Then what was it, spring training? You had it produced by "Little Jon" but it was just practice?

                      The record companies know the extreme numbers on Myspace are boosted. How many friends does Norah Jones have? (no official myspace page) How many units has she moved? And would Ms. Strawberry name each error I made? I’ll debate her point by point on every one. Don’t push it Tila, we’re on to you.I rest my case.

                      P.S. When I said "you" I meant Tila’s apologists not you personally. Tila is the musical equivilant of Enron, all hype and no substance. I hope you didn’t take my reply as a personal attack. I was just incensed that someone who doesn’t know me could attack me personally, when the numbers just don’t add up no matter how you work them. You can include this if you’re using my rebuttal.

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                      1. Brian L. Klein
                        Comment by Brian L. Klein | 2007/05/01 at 08:36:53

                        I was asked to put a proposal in to Renshaw’s office to promote Tila’s single online. It was designed to set up the release in a "super distribution" plan that I came up with. I’ve been very successful with this technique with the artist I manage named Joe Purdy. We’ve sold over 250k single downloads worldwide this past year and a half with no label. I’m doing this with all of the artists I manage. I’ve been working with majors and indies for years. I’m done with them. We are actually making money on record royalties this early in the game and reinvesting it!!

                        Renshaw’s office decided not to hire me. They fucked up. With the traffic Tila gets every day and her reach she should have done much better. Her music isn’t amazing but neither is a lot of shit that sells. They had one tiny buy button on her front page leading to itunes. NOTHING viral besides the video.

                        The reason I was excited to work on the project was her reach. 1.6 million "friends" should have had a bigger impact if executed properly. It was embarrassing to see what happened. They ended up hiring the same old "new media" marketing company every label hires. Her traffic should have been used to create thousands of front doors to her Itunes page. There was NOTHING forward thinking or exciting about what they did.

                        I understand where the digital market is headed so don’t respond with anything about Snocap already doing this and music should be free. I get that. Right now it’s all about effort and not what you spend and its about empowering and connecting with your base to help you grow and spread your music. The economics in the digital world do not work for big companies but for now they work for me.

                        My artists have never seen income off of record sales at a label unless they’ve recouped and then they earn 12-14%? The way I have it set up is we use the income to market, promote and create and OWN the content. All of Purdys albums stream for free on his website. We now sell 20-35k downloads per month. We release records when we want to and as often as we want to. We measure our own success. For the first time as a manager I don’t have to worry about managing a label’s enthusiasm and I’m having a blast!!

                        Joe records an album in 6-8 days. Last year he recorded one in London, Paris and New York. We just recorded on in Scotland 2 weeks ago.

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                        1. Anon
                          Comment by Anon | 2007/05/01 at 08:37:26

                          Anyone saying Tila’s numbers are organic is lying and insulting our intelligence at the same time. Tila used a bot for both friend adding and comment broadcasting. She even openly thanked/advertised for them in the comments. You can find the proof here (Google) by clicking on the cached version of the pages. You will see this comment posted by Tila Tequila:

                          hey just a test for a little program I got to

                          message all my friends. So now everyone

                          can get a comment from me 🙂

                          the program is over here:

                          http://www.silentproducts.cjb.net kisses

                          More on that here (http://web.archive.org/web/20060423165114/http://www.silent-products.com/) as well. The use of bots for comment broadcasting on MySpace was against Terms of Service at this time and she should have had her account removed but was given preferential treatment. Kind of similar to the way that Hollywood Undead are still listed in the "Unsigned" category of MySpace’s ranking system and given 8 songs in their player so that they can stomp the smaller bands and stay in the top ten. You may also notice One Republic (Interscope) and Hawthorne Heights (Virgin) in the top ten as "Unsigned". MySpace has lost a lot of the credibility they once had with artists due to their total lack of respect for any band/label who are not paying them. As the person stated in a previous email, MySpace allows major label bands to use bots with no consequence. I have seen the evidence of this firsthand. I see a mass exodus from that site happening in the next year or so.

                          On the off chance that you print this please leave my name off as I don’t really feel like having my account deleted should a MySpace employee happen across this…

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                          1. John McKay
                            Comment by John McKay | 2007/05/01 at 08:37:42

                            This might be even worse…

                            http://www.mysocialmarketing.com/shop/index.php?categoryID=86

                            You can now pay to get profile views and song plays for your band on MySpace. ie: Make-believe fans.

                            They make it seem as though you need at least 25,000 views to attract major labels.

                            Too bad they can’t clone humans to fill venues.

                            John McKay
                            Fenton, MI

                          This is a read-only blog. E-mail comments directly to Bob.

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