INTERNET MySpace site continues to attract many new fans

Many entertainers have found the site to be a powerful marketing tool.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
It's easy and startling to see MySpace.com grow.
Just log in at peak traffic times, click the "refresh" button on your Web browser and watch the number of members jump by the 4,000 or 5,000 users who just registered. That explosive growth soon will push MySpace's membership to 42 million -- and the site is less than 2 years old.
It's that vast reach that helped take comedian Dane Cook from relative obscurity a year ago to hosting "Saturday Night Live."
MySpace pulls it all together. It's where, for free, you can make your own Web page and direct people to it. Start your own blog. There's instant messaging and music downloads. It's spam-free for the moment, packed with music and comedy, growing by 4 million people a month and easy to use.
It's that huge audience, primarily teens and young adults, that's pushing the latest revolution in the music industry. More than 550,000 musicians have MySpace pages, with the ability to get heard, play gigs and make a living without radio, TV or even having a CD in stores.
Previously unknown bands, comedians and other entertainers now take their case directly to fans. Cook famously used the site to build a fan base, with 640,000 people now signed up as "friends" (people who use and get updates from your site).
Personalized community
MySpace in effect becomes a Web within the Web; some users have quit using e-mail and its inevitable spam to communicate with only friends of their choice logged into MySpace.
"It provides the one thing the Internet desperately needs, some kind of clearinghouse," says Robert Thompson, a pop-culture expert from Syracuse University. "MySpace.com provides an editing function to the Internet. And the Internet is in desperate need of editing."
Launched in January 2004 by Tom Anderson (who has since sold the site but still has a large presence in it), MySpace can credit part of its success to timing, with Internet penetration into the home and high-speed access at record levels.
"The key is that it's unregulated. It's a community where people are using it for what they want. Users are creating the content," says Diane Anderson, senior reporter for Brandweek, a San Francisco-based marketing magazine.
But another key is "the organic way in which it developed," Anderson notes. "They haven't made it this Big Brother thing -- 'We're going to promote these artists.' People find what they're looking for. They find like-minded people interested in the same types of music and from the same geographic area."
Musical movement
Several months ago, up-and-coming Denver band The Fray launched a MySpace page. Guitarist Joe King now says that the page is closing in on 100,000 page-views, that the single "Over My Head" has been played nearly 100,000 times and that MySpace will sponsor the band's first headlining North American tour in two months.
"I don't even know all the stuff we've got going with them," King said. "Sony is giving out stuff to MySpace winners. We're incorporating this huge MySpace thing into our tour. It's pretty wild.
"It's funny because we just started maybe seven months ago. This whole MySpace movement is huge. We've got, like, 11,000 friends," King says with a laugh of disbelief (the number is closer to 13,000). "You can blast everybody with a message: 'The Fray is doing this or that.'"
Despite trafficking in comedy, movies and people writing to and for one another, MySpace is making its biggest reputation in music.
Interscope Records recently partnered with the site to launch the MySpace label. The site also is sponsoring concert tours. And it was the first place you could see concert footage from Nine Inch Nails and hear new albums from Madonna and, most recently, Neil Diamond ("the Rick Rubin-produced album . . . Neil Diamond at his coolest," Anderson notes).