Blog - MySpam
MySpam
Nothing much worth complaining, but I thought I'd mention that since signing up to MySpace, I've got a number of "friend requests" from Japanese artists that obviously don't know me, obviously just wanting me to jump to their profile and listen to their latest song.
If it does look half decent, and if their own "top friends" reflect my own tastes (e.g. if we have common favorite artists), I'll often have a listen and will gladly accept their friend request.
However, most of the time it's not, and they obviously didn't care whether their sound might fit my tastes, and to me it's just spam and it's not the right way to promote a band.
MySpace's interface does provides a "spam" button for messages, but not for friend requests. Some of those spammy artists do send me a message too, saying "please listen to our music" or stuff like that. Is it ok if I mark those as spam, or is that "spam" button meant for real spam like
Being a MySpace newbie, I'm curious and would like to hear from the old-timers.
Is this accepted behavior that everyone tolerates? Am I expected to feel compassionate and blindly "approve" all requests? Is it only Japanese artists that use MySpace for this kind of direct shameless promotion?
(So far 100% of those requests were from Japanese artists, though of course my profile says that I'm in Japan and links to mostly Japanese artists, making me an easy target.)
Posted on April 2, 2007 at 21:14 | Tweet
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Okay, quick answer is just ignore them.
Maybe it's too late for you, but it's advisable to give myspace a free e-mail account address and bogus personal info. That way when myspace gets hacked or sells your info (like yahoo groups did along with your cookie info) then they don't really get anything worth anything.
The main window of abuse strangers can open up is as a friend they can fill your page's public comments with spam that at the minimum you have to read to clean up (but a lot of people defult to just having it show up without approval).
Like you already said I pretty much approve anyone who has like musical interests on their profile so long as their goal doesn't seem to be promoting themselves every chance. I figure some people might be new like you so I just ignore their request if I see no similar interests. I'd personally only report them if they are fake people. And if they are then there is near zero chance you aren't the only one.
Okay where are your people coming from, my guess is they read your blog if they are a Japanese band. There are some people who are fans of someone and check out all the friends of that artist to I guess "collect" them too, but that doesn't sound like what's going on.
I guess my technopop.info site never mentions my myspace page so I've not gotten a single Japanese musician asking to be my friend whom I didn't know already and almost always asked them before they ever asked me. I do get requests from some american bands probably using scripts to likely ask everyone. Sometimes specialized interest musicians forums has a "who has a myspace page" request. I always honor that if I participate in that forum
Not really on topic but I found 2 "fan" pages about a friend of mine who didn't know they existed. Matter of fact they were there months before I found them and were packed with all sorts of sloppy myspace stuff. Now the real person has a bunch of website fan pages already which are fine. So I had to explain that these mostly American myspace members were writing in all excited in being this artist's myspace friend and asking questions and the person with the page was just adding their comments and never once saying they weren't really that artist they just did a page for presumably fun. So he quickly had myspace shut that down when he realized what I meant by other fans thinking it's his own page. I could definitely see potential abuse in sending out personal messages/
Posted by ndkent on April 3, 2007 at 02:52
Thanks for the great sum-up!
Well it must have to do with my country set to Japan then, perhaps some automated scripts sending requests to all Japan users. I sure doubt so many Visual-kei bands read my blog. :)
Posted by Patrick on April 3, 2007 at 10:35
I'm sure you could pretty easily set it to Canada or somewhere ususual and probably prove or disprove the theory. It does sound like it could be a script looking for Japan. You could also ask a real japanese myspace freinds who aren't known on the net if they got the same requests.
Posted by ndkent on April 3, 2007 at 12:32
Oh and I forgot to mention. Years ago someone put me on some kind of new music or electronic music contact list without permission. Because of that I'd get all these real but clueless people wanting to be promoted e-mailing me. I'd ask them where they were getting my address from but I never tracked them down. Maybe they realized that the mysterious database was a waste of time.
Posted by ndkent on April 3, 2007 at 12:40
> I'm sure you could pretty easily set it to Canada or somewhere ususual and probably prove or disprove the theory.
As you could set yours to Japan if you think you prefer getting requests from Japanese bands rather than ones from the US. :) ... as I do, so I think I'll keep my country set to Japan even though this won't help solving the mystery.
Posted by Patrick on April 3, 2007 at 13:07
AS for me, I add mostly artist that have been or wil lbe broadcasted on our radiostation, the rest is friends. However when I notice that someone will comment with spam, like CHECK WHO IS READING YOUR MYSPACE profile by clicking on given link I will delete that user and comment instantly. As far as I know haven't had that yet, but if you check out profile's from for example famous artsit with at least 10000 friends, you won't find one single normal comment anymore. That takes away al lthe fun.
Anywho, for me myspace is more for keeping in touch with friends and for promotion of my work, nothing more.
Posted by Papigiulio on April 3, 2007 at 21:29
Well I could set my page to "Japan" but that would sort of mess up getting local gigs. But from that point I guess that can hold true too for being informed of events you might want to be part of.
A comment on the last post -- well I guess it's sort of a challenge to not approve a spam generating profile to begin with.
I guess there's another category, right? Artist's pages that aren't actually the artist or their staff. I guess the up front ones that clearly say they are fan pages are fine. It's the ones that look at first glance that they are that artist's page that are trouble.
It's strange to see a real artist have a fan made or fake page in their top firends. Makes you wonder if maybe that page too is a fake artist page or if the real artist doesn't realize their "friend" is at best a tribute page. But anyway, no big deal unless a fake page is going around sending e-mail to people posing as that artist or giving out bogus info.
Posted by ndkent on April 5, 2007 at 20:07
actually, you can set your Myspace page to just don't accept bands/artists request, so it will force the person that "really" wants to add you send you a nice message and will require original e-mail address from that person.
Anyway, I just had one spam like this since I went to Myspace but as far as I know lots of japanese bands use to activate this "block artists requests" feature,maybe this "country" thing is true.
Posted by Leandro on April 11, 2007 at 21:45
Thanks for the tip! I didn't know that! I might make use of that if things get out of control. :)
Posted by Patrick on April 14, 2007 at 11:47