So here I am - a new beginning. I posted my blogs on MySpace for many years, mostly reviews of the countless gigs I go to. I first started doing them because people were always asking me what gigs I'd been to recently and what the shows were like? I got fed up of constantly repeating myself - telling different people the same stuff over and over again or writing the same things in e-mails to different people. So I thought I'd just write about all the gigs and post it up online somewhere, then post online or e-mail links to my friends - then everyone was free to read about all the gigs (or not) as they chose. MySpace seemed a good place to do it. So that's what I did. I got a cheapo digital camera and started taking pictures at gigs - just to illustrate my blogs. I've got such a crap memory that having pictures to refer to often helps jog my recollections as I write about a gig sometimes weeks after it happened. People seemed to like my blogs, and some bands did too - maybe apart from the ones I slagged off....
Quite a few people started subscribing to my blogs on MySpace. Some were my friends already, some were bands or musicians, promoters, and quite a few random people I didn't know at all - some of whom I suspect are incognito musicians as certain ones I have met seem to know a lot about what I have written although they don't appear to read or subscribe to my blogs, or even use MySpace...
Anyway, this went on for quite a few years and my blogs seemed to become quite popular in some quarters. I posted literally hundreds of blogs - mostly reporting on gigs I went to, although occasionally I'd post on something more personal or some other sort of event - there would be the odd rant too. And one or two even ones as well.
Then, two or three years ago MySpace got taken over and the people in charge ruined it. They'd obviously never heard the saying "If it ain't broke - don't fix it". Well they 'fixed' it anyway. They fixed it good. In fact they broke it. A lot of the best and most useful features vanished or were changed for the worse. It was confusing and harder to use - there seemed no reason for this. People abandoned MySpace in droves. I didn't want to go to Facebook as it seemed rubbish for music compared to MySpace, and it didn't have a blog feature. And the name Dark Lord of Barnet isn't allowed on Facebook anyway. So I stayed on MySpace - largely to keep blogging, and also because it was still far better for music and related things, events and so on. Not everybody left MySpace - quite a few people and bands continued to keep a presence there - mainly because it was still the best place for music even though it was a shadow of it's former self. MySpace did get a lot quieter though - a lot of people either deleted their accounts completely or just didn't log on any more. MySpace died a bit of a death - self inflicted. After a while it did slowly improve, but the damage was done and most people stayed away.
MySpace did improve quite a bit over the last couple of years, but hardly anyone noticed. It never got back to being as good as it used to be though. I carried on blogging there and using it socially as I hadn't found anything better. As not many people were looking at MySpace any more I posted links to my MySpace blogs elsewhere and they continued to get quite a few hits from bands and my other regular readers - there was no need for people to log in or look at the rest of MySpace if they didn't want to.
Then there was another MySpace takeover. Another set of idiots in charge who didn't understand what they'd got or how it worked. And they changed it again - and this time they really ruined it! The 'New' MySpace was introduced but existing users were allowed to keep their old 'Classic' profiles going. Until last week. Then everybody was forced to go over to the new version whether they liked it or not! Many features were missing - all our old personal messages had gone. The Event feature had vanished, as had all our old comments. And the Blog feature had also gone! Blogging was the main thing which had kept me using MySpace, although the music features were good too - free streaming of nearly every band/artist/song you could think of - it was still a good place to discover new music or old favourites. Not only could I not post any new blogs, but all my old ones had vanished too - hundreds of them, and thousands of photos that featured in my blogs. And there seems to be no way of accessing them so we can save them either, although I'm sure MySpace still have them all saved on their servers somewhere....
So, I had to find somewhere else to post my new blogs - and maybe one day put my old ones if I can ever get my data back from MySpace. And so the story begins again...
Watch this space....
PS: After many people complained, MySpace eventually made people's old blog posts available for download in early 2014. They didn't restore the Blog feature to MySpace though. The Blog download took the form of a Zip file containing all the old blog posts as individual files - which I had to then upload one by one to Blogger. There were 951 files, so as you can imagine this all took me some time. I have now re-posted virtually all my old MySpace blog posts on here. The ones originally posted on MySpace are dated 16/7/2005-5/5/2013. I have put them up with minimal or in some cases no editing due to the massive amount of time involved. The editing has been restricted to a little reformatting (but I couldn't be bothered to do much as it would have taken far too long) and some corrections for grammar - I didn't bother proof reading everything so no doubt a few mishtakes remoan. Google Chrome flagged up some spelling mistakes that I missed first time round so they have (mostly) been corrected, but apart from those things I have re-posted the text in it's warts and all entirety as it was originally - some things are now 'public' which were private or 'Friends Only' on old MySpace privacy settings so more is revealed now than before. ;-)
Some of the links in the old posts still work - some don't. I didn't have the time or inclination to check them or fix broken links. Some of the bands and their websites have since long since vanished, and other bands have new websites so the old links don't work - Google is your friend. ;-) Amazingly, virtually all the pictures are still on various servers and show up in the posts. I don't mind bands/people using them as long as I am credited. Steal them or pass them off as your own at your own peril....
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