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62% of bands on MySpace are inactive

16 points by corgan1003 ↗ HN
I recently did some research only to find that 62% of bands on MySpace are inactive. I posted the php and ruby scripts and results here:

http://www.tonyamoyal.com/blog/

Enjoy!

19 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 57.2 ms ] thread
dcurtis
62%? Considering the vast number of bands on MySpace, I'd say that's a huge number.

For most web apps, that's a good number of active users.

Why do you say "only"?

fallentimes
I agree - assuming the calculations are correct, that's impressive on myspace's part.
ed
Does this say more about MySpace or the people forming bands?
alarmist
The bands. I was in one for a long time, and until we finally settled on a name, we would make a brand new page three or four times a week.
rms
What percent of users are inactive?
dcurtis
Is that a joke? Are there more levels of activeness besides Inactive and Active?
rms
It wasn't really a joke, I was wondering if there was any difference in the average inactivity between users and bands.

And yes, there are more levels of inactiveness. I have a Myspace profile with 29 friends, I log in every couple of weeks, but I'm definitely not an active user.

dcurtis
Oh. I'd define "inactiveness" as never visiting again, or visiting so irregularly that you don't really get any value from the app.

You're an "active" user of MySpace if you go there every couple of weeks, in my opinion.

chris
Cool. I'd be interested in seeing the results of the same test using 1 million random myspace id's rather than sequential id's from 100-101M.
sanj
Does this does introduce a serious sampling bias? Is 100-101M in the middle of the id range? Or at the head or tail?
corgan1003
I did not just look at 100-101M. I looked at 100-110M, ~200k from each interval of one million. I concurrently ran 10 threads looking at intervals of one million. I did not include this in the code because I wanted to keep it as short as possible for the blog entry.
jfornear
I am not surprised by this finding at all. My old band, myspace.com/sometimesitrains has been inactive too.
delano
But the bands on Myspace that have representation are hella active. It still plays a big part in getting deals and often after you're signed, labels expect to see continuous growth in terms of views, plays, and "friends".
corgan1003
I agree that MySpace is a great tool for bands. I am in a band and actively use MySpace. This article is in no way trying to knock MySpace (I hope it was not perceived that way). I am just stating some facts that I thought some people would find surprising.
mattjung
The number for inactive blogs (or inactive users in web-applications) is surely much higher because its even easier to create a blog. People play around with something new, find something better, etc.
Tichy
Just curious, how can you identify that a profile is a band? I've noticed the "MySpace music profile" pattern match, is that something you can tag a profile with? Who tags the profiles?
corgan1003
That is correct. I found that all MySpace music profiles have that pattern. I think MySpace does it.