Rupert Murdoch totally owns your friends. Or at least, your friends list. I mean, what's the difference, anyway? As you may have already read, as of July 18, Fox Interactive Media acquired Intermix Media--the parent company of MySpace--to the tune of $580 million dollars. MySpace.com, a "social-networking" site that you should so be over already, has in its two-year existence become one of the most frequented sites on the internet (fifth most popular, by some accounts). Beyond its primary purpose--that of acquiring and displaying the heavily Photoshop-ed visages of your acquaintances like some kind of bizarre trading card collection--MySpace does the world a tremendous favor by hosting crappy music files for seemingly millions of bands I've never heard of, all clamoring to count me as one of their very special, largely anonymous friends. Strangely, even proper bands with proper websites and proper label budgets have taken to augmenting their existing web presence with sterile, impersonal MySpace profiles--conceivably to boost fanbase awareness, and amass marriage proposals from sexy, sexy teenagers.

The question a lot of the world's more socially conscious bands may be asking themselves is how long's it gonna take before ol' Rupert's brittle death grip starts clogging up our utopia with ads for Cheaper By the Dozen Part Two? Representatives for Fox Interactive claim they keep their nose out of MySpace for the most part, but the novelty-sized check for $580 million seems to suggest that such a laissez-faire attitude is unlikely. Couple that with the fact that Murdoch is one of the world's clearest figureheads of corporate evil, and suddenly every self-respecting band in the world has more than enough motivation to disassociate themselves with the otherwise inconsequential site.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that, like myself, your conscience for such matters has been beaten back by an alarming level of internal justification--so much so that you can comfortably live with the infinitesimal amount of corroboration with Fox Media that hosting your band's music on MySpace presumes. All of that aside, why would any self-respecting musician forego the now-requisite, completely un-navigable flash site in favor of the painfully Geocities-fab layouts over at MySpace? And what in god's name did I do to make you think that I'd want to check out the four-track tapes of your prog-zydeco band, anyway?