Shameless venting, it does follow...

Self-promotion was once a tedious task for the struggling artist (or business, depending on how you look at it). Then the mega-Internet came to the rescue and made it a billion times easier for us all to hawk our wares in whatever shape or form.
Self-promotion is now a mouse-click away. But with the luxury of this technology comes a price. It seems we've lost some definition of what the boundaries are.

As an example of this, and call me old-fashioned, it struck me as just a bit "counter-indie" for bands on Myspace and other similar sites to continually spam you about their upcoming gigs/releases/orgy events on your own page. That would be like me going to a band's gig, grabbing a bunch of flyers for my own show, ripping them up and scrunching them into tiny balls, pushing them into a pen and spit-balling them at every musician on the stage. An impact to be had, sure. But is the message actually getting through?

Friend requests are a different proposition. I'm not sure why a Scandinavian death metal band thinks I might like their music (or they liking mine) but lately, I seem to have more Scandinavian death metal bands as "friends" than I envisaged.

By the same token, I don't like denying requests, partly because I'm worried they will get all Satan-on-my-skinny-ass but also in a way, a denial seems "counter-indie", no matter how superficial the request was.

Yes, everyone these days is in a band and everyone knows someone who is in a band and everyone has a band to promote.
But without sounding preachy (too late), I think we should be spending less time trying to "promote" our own stuff through cheap means and more time listening to and giving other music a go. There's a lot of diamonds in the rough out there, if you look hard enough. In my next blog I'll attempt to show you a few gems.

-AMCS