Morning Music Notes – So You’re Saying MySpace was No Good?

A short list of news for you folks this morning.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have announced the tracklisting for their upcoming album , I’m With You. The first single is the interestingly titled The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie. There is another song entitled Dance, Dance, Dance, which could lead to all sorts of interesting segue options. Here’s to hoping the album is not Lady Gaga-influenced (and by that, I mean the tour outfits are not wacky and show cleavage; although the band has no problem with nudity – cocks with socks anyone?)

Do Social Networks Really Help Musicians?

An interesting article from HypeBot/Music Think Tank, pondering whether or not social networks help musicians.

“What always struck me as strange was how musicians on myspace.com actually thought that having a million friends was a good thing (despite the fact those friends were all musicians who only ‘friended’ so that they can get more ‘friends’ for themselves). Can people spot the problem here? It’s a fake market, a bit like the sub-prime mortgages that bought the banks down.”

“Yes, but there is a problem here also. 99% of the music on social networks is junk. A song that was thrown up by a band 3 years ago is still there, effectively competing with millions of other songs in a sea of mainly poorly written and poorly executed music. This overcrowding, or “noise” makes it harder for talented musicians to get spotted (because it makes it harder for A&R to do their job).”

[PHM: Hopefully this logic doesn’t prove counter-intuitive for the forthcoming launch of my blog, with my twitter followers.]