Isaac Slade used to think that having 2,000 friends on MySpace was a real accomplishment.
The Fray lead singer remembers walking out of a studio three years ago and meeting a group on break from its own own recording session. After exchanging band names, its members told him they had 2,000 friends on MySpace, a number that impressed Slade, who had recently created the Fray’s MySpace profile.
“At the time I had like 40 friends on there,” he said with a laugh.
What a difference three years makes.
The Denver-based band, which plays a sold-out stint at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on Saturday through Monday, now boasts more than half a million MySpace friends. Every day the band adds hundreds, if not thousands, more. Its ability to connect with young, tech-savvy fans through social networking sites like MySpace has made it one of the most successful of the digital age.
Besides selling more songs on iTunes than any other, the Fray’s hit singles, including “Over My Head (Cable Car)” and “How to Save a Life,” have been streamed 53 million times on its MySpace profile, averaging more than a million plays per month.
“Sometimes I wish we got paid for MySpace hits, because I’d be a very rich man,” Slade said. “Our fans have kind of embraced us as one of those niche MySpace-YouTube bands.”
The interwoven nature of the Internet allows anyone with a song title to instantly call up a plethora of information on an act. But MySpace – one of many free, membership-driven sites that allows you to collect friends and bands like baseball cards – has streamlined the process, making it a one-stop shop for music sampling.
In other words, bands without MySpace profiles are missing one of the most effective promotional tools available. Despite the occasional copyright scare, MySpace continues to attract increasing numbers of them. Like the upstart site Bebo, groups can circumvent record labels and distribute their music to unlimited numbers of people, all with a user-friendly interface.
“There are cities we’ve never been to before where kids know our names and are singing along to our songs,” said Patrick Meese, lead singer of the Denver band Meese. “It’s because MySpace is so accessible and easy to navigate, once you’re familiar with it.”
Meese has been on an amphitheater tour with the Fray for the past week, affording it more exposure than it has ever had. But its MySpace connection with the Fray is equally valuable.
“What these kids are doing is going to the Fray page like they do every day and seeing our profile as one of their friends,” Meese said. “You don’t have to know a different domain name or go to another website. It’s all right there.”
For the uninitiated, MySpace may seem faddish, but the site’s addictive interface and unlimited potential to connect is big business. The News Corp.-owned site boasts 70 million active monthly users – names the company can serve up to advertisers with laserlike demographic accuracy.
Forbes predicted the site will rake in $1 billion in revenue this year. Consider that News Corp. purchased MySpace for about half that in 2005, outbidding Viacom with a $580 million offer to its founders. As many business analysts have noted, it was a steal.
Sites like MySpace are also changing the way the record industry works. Warner Music Group and EMI are developing models to allow bands (and their fans) to sell music directly from their MySpace profiles, even if the site’s retail potential still is unproven.
All this amounts to a new horizon for bands looking to publicize themselves.
“With digital, it happens so much broader than you can do otherwise,” Slade said. “The trend just carves a lot faster.”
Meese knows this well. Each night after its opening slot for the Fray, it received dozens of MySpace friend requests. Meese now has almost 25,000 friends. The band also enjoys more than 20,000 song streams per day – part of the reason it’s razor-close to signing with a major label.
“MySpace is only going to get bigger as the younger kids get older and more people become tech-savvy,” said Meese.
Like any website, it is prone to sabotage, as in Q magazine’s recent experiment, where it created a fake indie band (Hope Against Hope) and watched it collect label and management offers based solely on its connections and image. The magazine dubbed MySpace “a cog in the older industry phenomenon of hype.”
MySpace may bear resemblance to staid marketing techniques, but it’s impossible to ignore its current dominance and potential.
“The Fray’s a perfect example because they’ve got cross-genre appeal,” said Meese. “A lot of young kids dig the music, but at a lot of these shows we’re seeing older couples and parents who heard their song on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ or something. The Fray gives them a reason to learn how to get on MySpace.”
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
The Fray
POP-ROCK|Red Rocks Amphitheatre, 18300 W. Alameda Parkway; 7:30 p.m., Saturday-Monday|$35.50, SOLD OUT|ticketmaster.com.
