MySpace offers rock and jazz classics

Tila Tequila, the amorous reality-show enthusiast and sometime singer, can take a lot of the credit for ruining MySpace’s reputation. Her popular member page, myspace.com/tilatequila, on America’s most-visited social network is so overloaded with pictures and videos of her in scantily clad outfits that it may lock up your browser.
Many of MySpace’s member profiles — of which it has more than 100 million — are juvenile and crude. But there’s a hidden side to the oft-mocked social networking site: It has become a great place for people who were grooving to Fleetwood Mac 14 years before Tila was born. MySpace may now be the best place for grown-ups to find free music on the Web.

Miles Davis has a MySpace page, and 168 of the trumpet player’s albums and singles have been uploaded to his MySpace area, including the formerly rare LP “Circle in the Round.” A few clicks away are 68 Billie Holiday records.

MySpace’s hyperactive profile pages rocked the Internet when the site opened in the summer of 2003. Since then, Facebook and Twitter have stolen MySpace’s buzz, especially for older, less self-promotional adults. These are the people who want to reconnect with friends from school without posting “MySpace angle” self-portraits that flaunt their sexual desirability.

“I guess I’m just the wrong age for MySpace,” shrugged a former MySpace user, now in her late 30s, at a cafe in San Francisco’s Mission district. A graying Facebook user at the next table chimed in, “I never figured out what MySpace was for. Does anyone still use it?”

To attract older users, MySpace sought out older musicians. The first upload of U2’s “Get On Your Boots” video in February — the singer Bono is now 49 — went straight to MySpace in an exclusive deal. Neil Young, who turned 63 last November, posts his iconoclastic, low-rent music videos at myspace.com/neilyoung.

Lionel Richie, another heavy MySpace presence, is using the site to promote his new release “Just Go,” which came out in May. “If I weren’t an avid MySpace user, I would run out of stuff to talk to my teenage kids about,” Richie said in an e-mail message. Not content to be confined online, Richie joined with MySpace to produce a free live show on May 31 at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles.

The event was one of a series the company calls MySpace Secret Shows. The only way to get into a Secret Show, scalpers aside, is to join MySpace and pounce on the print-it-yourself tickets that become available at noon on the day of the show.

Richie, who turns 60 on June 20, seems still hungry to win fans, to score another top-of-the-charts hit. But what about rock stars who’ve hung up their guitar straps for good? MySpace has made deals with record labels to create album pages and artist homes for mature acts, like the Goth rockers the Cure, who no longer crank out records or go on big tours. The Cure performed a Secret Show in December. Then, instead of tackling new material for another album, the band posted the live tracks of their hits to MySpace.
Besides its extensive catalog — try to find Motley Crue’s “Dr Feelgood” in Pandora’s streaming library — MySpace has a simple, singular seductive advantage over its rival listening post Imeem and the Apple iTunes Store: visitors can listen to any of the music on MySpace free, instantly without being forced to sign up. You can swoon to Miles’s trumpet from any computer, without needing to remember yet another password.

Ten years after Napster, the music industry has learned to work with the Internet. You can spend hours poring through the archives at imeem.com, where users have painstakingly uploaded songs and videos you thought you’d never see again: Iggy Pop wriggling on “The Old Grey Whistle Test,” or David Bowie’s wonderfully bizarre 1979 appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”

Many other sites are worth touring. Pandora is probably the most talked about. Type in the name of a band or a song and Pandora will create a custom playlist for you, using mathematical models to guess what you’d like to hear next. Blip.fm is the hip site with younger fans, who build their own DJ playlists and trade messages (“blips”) in a sort of Napster-meets-Twitter interface.

MySpace doesn’t require you to sign up or log in, but members get privileges. First, they can create custom playlists that mix superstars and garage bands from five million-plus artists onto one virtual mix tape. Second, members are able to flip MySpace into a Lite mode. The recently introduced option replaces busy-looking profile pages with stripped-down HTML that looks like — well, Facebook.

To monetise its listeners’ warm fuzzy feelings, MySpace directs visitors to Amazon.com. There, they can buy Richie’s new album as a $9.99 compact disc or download the single “Just Go” for 79 cents. The MP3 files have no copy protection technology, so they’ll play on almost any computer, iPod, MP3 player, smartphone or other gadget. Amazon splits its revenue with MySpace and the record labels, which presumably pay the musicians.
MySpace works fine as a classic-hits machine. It can dispel the drone of a workday with James Taylor’s archive, Billy Joel’s 50-record catalog, and all 26 tracks of Leonard Cohen’s “Live in London.” By serving forty-somethings, the company does face one risk: Once parents bookmark Miles Davis’s page, will MySpace still be cool with their kids?