It was high time, really.
I noticed that one of the designers responsible for this website’s design has quoted on his profile somewhere that he’s motivated by ‘bad memories of MySpace’.
I actually liked MySpace. (In its heydey, at least.) I thought it was great that you could have this information in one place, in a standardised format. And it really didn’t hurt that everyone could customise sites how they wanted: as the quickest of glances at a band’s MySpace page could probably tell you more about them than their music.
Of course, whatever you did it looked ugly as the proverbial fuck, but that was the days before everything had to be clean and shiny.
But everything has to be clean and shiny now, which is a trend that I myself have succumbed to. And I was conflicted about it. Part of me wanted to make a really dirty website. White on black, with strong primary colours and everything in a small Verdana typeface.
I still might, actually, depending on whether all that beauty and that style gets kind of smooth after a while.
But right now, I’m actually very impressed with the beauty and the style of the AudioTheme websites, and I’d highly recommend them to any other musicians who just want something that’s fairly simple to use which can hopefully free them up to make some actual music.
And yeah, it’s a lot better than MySpace.
P.S. For anyone who doesn’t know how MySpace met with such a disastrous end, this is a fascinating read:
Financial Times: The rise and fall of MySpace.
Photo by Quinn Dombrowski (CC BY-SA 2.0)