The five members of the 88, an independent rock band from Los Angeles, thought a single on "The O.C.'s" soundtrack and a performance on late-night TV's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" would win them fans. They were right. But the fans didn't share much of that love until the 88 hit MySpace.com.
The popular online hangout featured the band on its front page, where the 20 million members sign in. The 88's songs were streamed to users' computers nearly 70,000 times last month, and 17,000 people added the band to their list of friends. As word spread around the website, hundreds of messages a day -- example: "u kids rock like madd" -- began pouring in from places as distant as Malaysia.
"There were a lot of people who had never heard of us before," said the 88 pianist Adam Merrin. "It was a great way to build anticipation for our upcoming record."
Music has helped MySpace generate Web traffic that rivals some of the Internet's titans. More than 350,000 bands and solo artists, from the unknown to the famous, have set up pages on the website to let people sample and share songs, exchange e-mail with the bands and see tour dates. Bands such as R.E.M., Weezer and Black Eyed Peas have streamed new albums on MySpace for a week before the records hit stores.
There's more to do than listen to music: Users spend hours on the site writing blogs and e-mail, reading classified and personals ads, playing video games and chatting with strangers.
Each new page seen gives the Santa Monica-based company a chance to show more ads. Only Web giants Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. displayed more online ads in May than MySpace, according to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings.
It hasn't been all smooth sailing for MySpace. School officials and child advocates have warned that children can easily stumble across -- or hunt down -- frank sexual discussion and other inappropriate material on sites like MySpace. Company executives say such problems happen on any large Web community; they don't censor their members' postings except for hate speech.
MySpace is also linked to an alleged spyware company. Intermix Media Inc., a Los Angeles-based company recently sued by New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer for allegedly planting malevolent programs in games and screen savers, owns half of MySpace (Intermix and Spitzer have reached a tentative out-of-court settlement for the company to pay $7.5 million).
