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Ed Says. . . you need a relevant online presence.

If you want to be taken seriously, you need to have more than a Myspace page going for you.

I remember when Myspace first took off: I was in a band myself (the provocatively titled Whore!), and it seemed like a godsend at the time. I was able to communicate with hundreds of people at a time, arrange gigs, and even pick up a few fans along the way - one of which ended up becoming Mrs Ed. But alas, it all soon turned sour. Myspace - not my marriage, which, unlike the former, is still going strong.

Everyone who owned a guitar or keyboard suddenly had their own Myspace page, and the ability to embed your own html background on the page meant that some pages could take an eternity to load before you realised the link you'd been sent consisted of a lone single man playing guitar with his feet for four whole tracks, flanked on all sides by a flickering background of cartoon monkeys picking their nose. Picking up fans became a pointless endeavour, as the site was now mostly comprised of other musicians, fake profiles trying to sell you "man pills", and anyone who was anyone had migrated to Facebook, SoundCloud and Bandcamp.

The problem with Myspace is that it's over. Like Friendster and Friends Reunited before it, people have moved on. The only people who still use them are people like my family (who have been known to phone me at one in the morning to ask if there's "any way on the PC to cut some text out of an article, and paste it into another"). By using Myspace as a landing page for your band, product or person, you are announcing to the world that you have no idea about current online trends, or the world at large. You are a relic that has refused to move on. Is this really the image you want to project when presenting yourself to the press?

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