Myspace hates you.

The fact that Facebook and Twitter have turned Myspace into a relative ghost town isn’t news. But it is still surprising to see how the once dominant social network continues to shoot itself in the foot. The one specific area where Myspace still has an advantage over all the others is music. It has a robust music player, and profiles designed specifically for bands and musicians. Over the last few years, it’s become an absolute necessity for bands big and small to have a presence on Myspace.

Among the best features of the site for exploring new music, was the local search tool. You entered a zip code to browse bands within a certain proximity of your location. You could even filter the search results to certain genres. I used it often, and it would return a list of local bands that I would have never been exposed to otherwise. When the time came to start digging through all the bands in Philadelphia for articles on this site, I had trouble finding that browse function that I had used so many times. I clicked and clicked, and all I found was a typical Top 10 style mainstream music chart. Barf.

I contacted Myspace directly to see if I was just overlooking it somehow. The official response was:

Thanks for contacting MySpace Music. Unfortunately, you are no longer able to search for different regions any longer. You can however, search for band names, songs and albums…

How beat is that? I don’t know the band name or the song name, because I want new music! With a database of thousands of bands in bigger cities, it seems utterly foolish to have no way to find them.

Currently, Myspace shows no interest in bringing this feature back, and to my knowledge there is no other tool with anything close to the power and simplicity of what they had in place. Am I out of the loop or what? Hit the comments sections if you know of any good tools like this. And by all means, send thoughts on this issue directly to Myspace. I think the local scene can only benefit from having a proper discovery tool.

About Joseph Rose

Joseph is a father, a music production teacher, and a front man. He consumes as much music as he does pizza. And that's a lot.