MySpace Invaders

Fall Out Boy’s concert ended almost two hours ago, and the scene in front of West Hollywood’s House of Blues — groupies, fans and gawkers, in a tumult of angst and adoration — looks, at first glance, just like the aftermath of any show since rock began. At the heart of this commotion, however, sits a vivacious, quadriplegic “20-and-a-half”-year-old in a hot pink wheelchair who’s reaching for her dream in a strange, new way.

“I just want to meet Pete,” she sighs — meaning Pete Wentz, Fall Out Boy’s lyricist and bassist — then grins as if she’s found a loophole in reality. “But I have pictures with him already.”

Having lost the use of her hands in a car accident when she was 16, Crystal Ennis tongues the keypad of her fuchsia cellphone to retrieve a snapshot of her and Pete locking lips — a souvenir of an experience she hasn’t had.

“Crystal’s very talented with Photoshop,” her friend Destiny says proudly.

Ennis adds, “It’s on my MySpace page,” where it bears a blushing, I’m-not-crazy caption: “i kno but i had 2.”



Crystal Ennis, from the Inland Empire suburb of Perris (“like France, but not”), California — and known on MySpace as “stitchedupbarbie” — may be the ultimate turn-of-the-century fan. Limits of geography and ability be damned: She uses technology to connect with favorite stars and fellow fans, creating a social world that blurs the lines between aspiration and intimacy, consumption and community.

It’s painstaking work. Cheerfully, she says, “I can type with one pinky knuckle.”

On a typical day, Ennis reads all of Pete Wentz’s online journals (“fueledbyramen.com, falloutboyrock.com, friendsorenemies.com …”); checks the message board for Fall Out Boy’s fan club, the Overcast Kids; chats on AIM with reps from FOB’s label, Fueled By Ramen; and spends “all day, from the time I get up to the time I go to bed,” on MySpace, talking to old friends and making new ones who are drawn to her profile, which plays Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” (“… the greatest fan of your life”) in an endless loop. The page is plastered with pictures (altered and not), scans of autographs, homemade digital band flyers, a bedroom-door-style list of “rules” (“ok no friend collectors i kno im a nice thing 2 collect but no!”) and a blog where, if you can brave the syntax and spelling, the story of Hilary Duff’s onstage concert dedication of “Fly” to Ennis might cue your inner violins. “Music = life it can get u threw so much sumtimes,” she writes.

MySpace hasn’t just changed Ennis’s life; it’s changed the whole music industry. Since launching in January 2004, MySpace has become the world’s largest social networking site, with 60 million members, many of them lured by the lollipop of a million bands’ home pages — abounding with blogs, free song downloads and the addictive sensation of personal contact with a rocker. In certain circles, MySpace competes with radio as the key medium for the promotion and marketing of music — artists ranging from Neil Diamond to Death Cab for Cutie now debut songs on the site. “And when you premiere your video,” says FOB’s Wentz, “your choices are MySpace or MTV.”

At the same time, MySpace has revolutionized relationships between musicians and their fans. It has completely changed the job of being a rock star. “You have to have a blog, pictures, Q & As, give your thoughts about all kinds of stuff, give songs away for free, keep up with all the messages coming in, and it all has to be kept fresh all the time,” says singer­songwriter Andrew McMahon, who fronts Geffen band Something Corporate as well as a solo project, Jack’s Mannequin. His voice wilts with exhaustion.

On the other hand, MySpace has also redefined the experience of being a fan, more or less enforcing universal conscription in the world’s biggest street team. Ask Ennis how she feels about her favorite bands, and she’s as apt to answer with marketing jargon as with goopy sentiment: “I promote Pete heavily on MySpace,” she says. “It’s so important to get the word out.”

But is there a difference between loving your favorite star and promoting him?

Apologizing, Ennis says, “I’m not sure I understand the question” — and that’s not because she’s stupid; it’s because MySpace has made a convincing show of tearing down the wall that has always separated buyers (fans) from sellers (stars).



Before you can understand how MySpace revolutionized relationships between stars and fans, you have to understand that, strictly speaking, there is no “relationship” between stars and fans. You can’t love Pete Wentz if you don’t know him; you can love only the work he’s made.

The nature of fandom as a fantasy was, throughout rock’s first decades, abundantly clear. Information was scarce, and the sensation of connection with a star was even scarcer. Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee remembers, “With my favorite guys — Bowie, Led Zeppelin — the only thing you had was an album cover to stare at for hours.”

For those who wanted to feel closer, mail-order fan clubs offered a magical transaction. In exchange for a mere money order, you became Ace Frehley’s foot soldier: a card-carrying, quarterly-newsletter-consuming, authentically-signed-poster-owning member of the Kiss Army. Membership’s biggest benefit was intangible: It made the fantasy of fandom feel a little bit more real.

Little changed for many years, until the Internet matured and evolved tools that, it seemed, could build foundations under everybody’s castles in the air. Blogging on livejournal.com, artists such as Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba pioneered what felt like a truly intimate dialogue with fans. File-sharing sites like Napster democratized music’s distribution, freed fans to dig for cool songs, and decimated the recording industry’s cultural authority.

MySpace combined blogging and file-sharing capability — and provided anyone with an Internet connection the opportunity to build homepages that would help in making “friends.” On MySpace, whether you’re Crystal Ennis or Fall Out Boy, your page has the same basic format, linked to other pages in the same way. When stars and fans add one another to their friend lists, these links appear onscreen as part of their web of connections. The basically commercial link between star and fan gets baptized as friendship — and photos of these “friends” show up on your page at about the size of a Ralph Lauren Polo pony.

Top MySpace bands tend to be pop-punk and emo subspecies: empath rock like FOB, Good Charlotte and My Chemical Romance, appealing to the kind of O.C.-sensitive kids most likely to pour out their hearts to their computers. These acts’ ascendance has influenced the industry as a whole.

Desperate-to-be-cool A&R guys now use friend-list tallies to measure aspiring bands’ sales potential. “This suit told me he’d just signed a band, like, ‘They’ve got 50,000 friends on MySpace!’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, great, dude, ’” says Andrew McMahon.

Musicians don’t sell stuff on MySpace, but every click and download adds up to a stream of market research. Adam Samiljan, director of online promotions for Fueled By Ramen, runs FOB’s MySpace page. “It’s an easy way to get instant response,” he says, “and learn which tour dates, which songs, which merch works best for the band.”

MySpace has been most canny, perhaps, in providing the Internet’s best mimic of the way music functions in fans’ everyday lives. You love your favorite band not because of who they are, but because of how they help you understand and express who you are, and who you could be — and because identifying with them lets you connect with other people who see the world in roughly the same way.

In that spirit, MySpace fandom — joining groups, adding friends, posting comments, ranking and forwarding profiles — blurs the distinction between expressing your own personality and basking in a star’s. It’s the most convincing virtual expression of the age-old imaginary relationship between celebrity and fan: So convincing, for some, that it creates false expectations.

“MySpace erased a line,” says Pete Wentz, a couple of hours before he takes the stage at House of Blues. “It’s like, all of a sudden you’re my quote-unquote friend? That’s really loaded. We have 750,000 ‘friends,’ and somebody comes up to me, like” — he drops his chin, black bangs falling in his eyes, and growls in a psycho voice — “‘Whoa. Why didn’t you add me?’

“A lot of the time,” Wentz continues, “you’re this shoulder to cry on, like a Dr. Phil.” He squirms with self-contradiction. “But it also works the other way. I write cathartic things on there.”

Two nights later, after Fall Out Boy lose to John Legend for Best New Artist at the Grammys, Wentz’s falloutboyrock.com journal entry concludes:

“get back to my room and light up the computer to see your q&a. that changed everything. the first four pages were filled with responses about how much you love us and support us no matter what — people defending us — telling us not to give up. amazing. you changed my night.”

Like most rock stars, Wentz, who’s 26, started as a fanboy — Circus magazine, the Misfits’ Fiend Club, sending self-addressed, stamped envelopes in letters to Guns N’ Roses, the Cure and Morrissey. “You’d get back something like, ‘Thanks for being part of this …’ There was way more separation: You are here, and they are there. You never felt like you were on the same level.”

Back at the House of Blues, Mike Rogers, the 20-year-old singer of a San Diego emo group called Stripped Down Hollywood, is working after hours to eliminate that distance between here and there. Behind the wheel of his Nissan Pathfinder, wearing a turquoise snowboarding beanie that’s covered with tassels, he leans out the window and hands his CDs to FOB’s lingering fans.

In the past year, Stripped Down Hollywood has been building a fan base by building a friend list — 5,360 and counting — mostly by going through the friend lists of bands whose sound they resemble (FOB, Panic! At the Disco, the All-American Rejects) and sending notes asking kids to check them out. “If I talk to some girl on MySpace, she’d most likely go to her friends and say, ‘Oh my god, these guys are so nice, they’ll talk to you,’” Rogers says. “MySpace is an oasis for kids that live in the middle of nowhere, and they’re so happy if you just give them a sentence back.” His voice sounds as sweet as Oreos and ice-cold milk, and serves as a reminder that being sold can be the same as being smitten. “We like to talk to them, because they’re usually really cool.”



With the support of its new owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — which purchased MySpace’s parent company last year for $580 million — MySpace will soon launch a mobile version of the site, a satellite radio channel and overseas expansions. “We’re trying to figure out what to do about China,” says CEO Chris DeWolfe, who co-founded the company with Tom Anderson, its president. This year brings the MySpace record label’s first joint release with Interscope (from a heavy metal/hip-hop band called Hollywood Undead, who have never performed live). Also on the drawing board: an overhauled instant-messaging service, and possibly Internet phone calls and a search engine.

As MySpace morphs into a “lifestyle brand” — and a portal site, to compete with Yahoo! (the only website that beats MySpace for page views) — its founders say music remains central to their plans. Anderson says that MySpace offers music fans something unprecedented and compelling: “A sense that the band is always with you, no matter where they are in the commercial sales cycle, regardless of whether they’re being promoted by the powers of the industry.”

DeWolfe adds, “They release an album, and that is perishable. A MySpace relationship is not perishable. It goes on forever.”

But as MySpace continues its explosive growth, some skeptics wonder how long the company can stay popular with young users who’ve been key to its success. Others ask how News Corp. might use the trove of priceless information about consumer preferences contained in MySpace user profiles.

Oedipally, Pete Wentz blurts, “MySpace is Fox News now,” then backtracks. “I think they try to maintain some kind of credibility. But what I see is that MySpace doesn’t matter as much as it used to. People are finding alternatives — friendsorenemies.com [a sarcastic, confrontational networking site] and buzznet [a photo and video journal site].”

Tom Anderson swats the naysayers like flies. “Two hundred and thirty thousand people signed up yesterday,” he says over lunch near the MySpace headquarters in Santa Monica. “The number just keeps skyrocketing.” Has there been any user blowback from the News Corp. purchase? “Honestly, nobody gives a fuck,” he replies.

Blender’s conversations with MySpace users confirm Anderson’s impression: A generation that keeps journals where anyone can read them doesn’t give a rip who keeps track of the CDs and sweatshirts they buy. When MySpace users criticize the company, they’re more likely to lament the way it’s speeding stardom’s life cycle and making it impossible to keep your favorite band a secret from the whole world.

Erik Ahad, a 16-year-old in Paramus, New Jersey, blamed MySpace for making FOB almost unbearably successful. (“I know Pete misses how it used to be. Playing with, like, nobody in front of him.”) Luke Wood, A&R exec for Interscope, who oversees the partnership with MySpace’s music label, points out that “part of adolescent identity is otherness, and you don’t feel like another when you’re one of everyone.” Nevertheless, he notes, MySpace is large enough to offer almost infinite choices for the determined outsider like Erik — who’s found a smaller band to love, October Fall.

But Erik’s voice breaks with anguish: Now October Fall’s exploding on MySpace, too, and pretty soon, “I’m just gonna be another kid to them. That’s gonna be horrible. That’s why I’m trying to get as close as I can right now. So maybe I can be remembered.”



At the House of Blues, as at the end of every Fall Out Boy show, the band perform “Saturday,” and their bodyguards and manager pick up Pete Wentz and hold him in the air, just below stage level, jutting out into the crowd. The kids rush forward, their ritual flurry of fingers covers his body and, later this same night, those same fingers type the story of the show on dozens of keyboards in dozens of bedrooms in dozens of suburbs in the Southland.

The next morning, Crystal Ennis — who gave up waiting for Pete at 1:35 A.M., when her friend Destiny had to drive them back to Perris — will read the stories on the message boards and MySpace blogs. Alone with her computer, in the glow that blinks almost imperceptibly as she surfs from page to page to page, she’ll tell herself she’ll have another chance at the next show — “It’s only a month away!” — and in the meantime, there’s always Photoshop, for acting out the newest version of her old, elusive dream.