MySpace.com is without question the former Big Kahuna of the Social Networking sites and at last check had over 150 million accounts signed up for it. When I first heard about the service I created a personal profile for the chance to network what I am up to in real life as well as reacquaint myself with long lost friends from the past (barring one or two minor exceptions).  This would essentially replace my use of Friendster and slowly start to dominate the time I was spending on Tribe.net.  Since I noticed some music related profiles existing on the at the time exciting service, I created a profile page for PiercingMetal.com and this profile became the one that I primarily used when I would log in.  In the beginning we were interested in adding everyone and anyone if the belief that it would expand the reach of PiercingMetal existed but over time we realized that most bands were just posting show announcements for areas we weren’t near and limited the adds to individual accounts or bands that had written to our headquarters in search of coverage.   When it came to the addition of bands we just had one criteria, and that was to please at least contact us like a professional medium that you wanted to work with.  Too many bands were starting to add everyone they could to post tour announcements or gigs they were doing that were not accessible by most of the people in their friends list.

I stood by that rule because it was becoming rude to just get blasts of emails that expected you to investigate on your own and learn about who was contacting you.  When one is trying to work through a pile of CD’s from label representatives and publicists, your free time to be a researcher is not always a large window.  In terms of its popularity, it has waned quite a bit from its original heyday but there are those who use it still and get what they want from it.  Many of the sites truest believers have our profile on the top of their friends list, and are always telling their own friends to come check us out which is never a bad thing.  I used all the aspects available when I saw that we could use them and while we had both a Group for the site along with a Blog, each of them were used to direct people right over to the main site where there was more PiercingMetal.com action to enjoy.  Bands of the world started to jump on MySpace.com with levels of zeal and would use this medium instead of paying for their own secure domain site. That made sense in some fashion since they were able to load in their own music and tour dates for free instead of paying for it. The down side was that for every great band there were hundreds of crappy ones and as more and more accounts got created, just try and find something with any ease. At the time of this writing, the rising star for Social Networking was quickly becoming Facebook.  The roller coaster of this new realm continues it would seem.

There were sweeping changes to the resource from top to bottom and many will tell you that simple maintenance became an impossible task and it was so annoying that many decided to drop their page and delete the account entirely but not before telling their fans, friends and family that they were exclusively using Facebook for future promotion.  As far as PiercingMetal.com is concerned I have left my account alone because the status now allows me to broadcast what is being posted on my sites official Twitter account.  Since the Twitter often refers to our Facebook page or Blog, I feel why delete something that reaches a few more people every day. At this point its just there and we politely ask those interested in PiercingMetal to come find us on either the Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Official Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace

UPDATE 12/3/2017: Despite leaving it in place for years after this narrative went live, today the two long standing accounts on the medium have been deleted in full. Goodbye MySpace, we used to really like it over there.