91Èȱ¬

A few years back, I was advising each band or artist I spoke to to have a presence.

It was a one-stop shop - a depository - for biography, pictures, tour dates and, most importantly, streamed mp3s. It was an 's dream: not having to root through mounds of badly-written letters and CDRs, he could simply trawl Myspace and listen to those 'tipped' acts who were getting all the attention.

Now, it looks like the service is in danger of being sold on or folded, unwanted and unloved by its parents, , who bought the service five years ago for $580 million. Welsh-based music merchandising service , which also blogs and tweets about the music industry, yesterday published a blog about the possible demise of the service.

"It's odd to think that just a few years ago most people couldn't be serious about making or promoting music without a strategy that had Myspace at its very core. But now the world has very quickly become a different place," said Dizzyjam's .

Myspace's effect was short-lived; it was the first service with a USP that took advantage of the surge in broadband to deliver decent streamed audio and was a short-term godsend for artists. But as with any basic economics, the more of something there is, the less valuable it becomes; so once Myspace had every third-rate Oasis covers band on it, with the same web presence as top-level signed artists, its USP had become almost useless, and far from unique.

Commenting on the Dizzyjam blog post, academic says, "Myspace is struggling as a social network, in part, because of Facebook... - but people decided quite some time ago that social networking was not what Myspace was for anyway. It was for bands. And Myspace has every band on the planet, give or take."

So in 2010, what would I advise artists? Not to put much effort into Myspace, that's for sure. Instead, there are a range of services such as , and , not to mention , that provide a more rounded delivery system of assets that can be manipulated depending on the needs of the artist. Harnessing the opportunities of the web can be a challenge in 2010 but it can deliver a nice package of material.

However, having had a couple of 'golden years' in which artists could stand out a little (see The Arctic Monkeys as the classic example), we're now back to a situation in which we have returned to an old-fashioned necessity to promote in a far more proactive way.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: 'The more things change, the more they stay the same' as Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr said. Things haven't haven't changed materially since 15 years ago. If you want to be signed, you still have to differentiate yourself, put yourself to the top of the pile, get those A&R men interested. Use the web to bolster your PR, embrace Facebook, Twitter and so on, but it's no substitute for that terrible mixture of hard work and good luck that every decent artist relies upon.

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