Yesterday I decided to post a comment on a couple of popular Bands that Ive already become friends with. In about 3 minutes I was receiving friend requests from random ass bands that I had never heard of before.

My guess on this is that smaller up-and-coming bands are probably monitoring bands they feel are in their same genre. They see kids posting comments to these bands pages and are like "Here we go, another potential fan". Granted, they could just cruise through the bands 'View All Friends' pages... but I think they're banking on the fact that you're active on MySpace.com. They dont want someone who doesnt comment, or participate in this social arena.

Give it a shot, what can it hurt right. And, you might just stuble upon some music that you've never heard of and a Band that is about to get HUGE!

Just look at Hawthorne Heights. They've redefined whats going on with MySpace, and are the poster children for why MySpace.com is becoming the new MTV for the NET Generation of Fans!

What they have is MySpace, a community Web site that converts electronic word of mouth into the hottest marketing strategy since the advent of MTV. Massively popular, MySpace is nominally a social networking site like Friendster, but nearly 400,000 of the site's roughly 30 million user pages belong to bands. The rest belong mostly to teens and twentysomethings who attend the groups' shows, download their songs, read their blogs, send them fan mail, and enthusiastically spread the word.

As it happens, the man behind this phenomenon is working his way through the Warped Tour crowd like a rock star himself. Everyone seems to know Tom Anderson. A laid-back 29-year-old in a plaid shirt and baseball hat, he can hardly take three paces before he's asked to autograph a shoe, a T-shirt, or in one case a naked back. No wonder: His photo shows up at the top of every MySpace user's "friends" list. As the first friend of every MySpace member, Anderson may be one of the most popular humans on the planet.

And in the entertainment universe that MySpace is helping to create, friends count. "This generation is growing up without having ever watched programmed media," says Courtney Holt, head of new media and strategic marketing at Interscope, one of the first labels to embrace MySpace. "They don't think in terms of the album, and they don't think in terms of a TV schedule. They think in terms of TiVo, P2P, AOL, and of course MySpace. We're just going to have to adapt."

By any measure, MySpace is one of the top sites on the Web. It racked up 9.4 billion pageviews in August - more than Google - and new users are signing up at a stunning rate of 3.5 million a month. But these aren't the only numbers that drew the attention of Rupert Murdoch, chair and CEO of News Corp., which agreed to buy MySpace's parent company in July for $580 million: The site hosts 12 percent of all ads on the Web, more than any other site. MySpace should gross $30 million to $40 million this year, says John Tinker, an analyst with ThinkEquity in New York. And with News Corp.'s sales force behind it, he estimates the company could double that figure in 2006.

To focus on corporate finances, though, is to miss a larger point. The real economic beneficiaries of MySpace are the ambitious young musicians in Pomona and around the country who are creating a new, life-size kind of stardom. Over the past couple years, MySpace and other community sites have launched a number of acts: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Relient K, and Silverstein, among others. Relient K, which plays earnest pop punk with an understated Christian message, has sold more than 500,000 albums in 12 months. My Chemical Romance's last album sold more than 1 million copies.

These artists have discovered what could be the first serious business model for music in the post-Napster era. The old way of doing things, which counted on a few blockbusters to finance dozens of expensive failures, is yielding little besides a decline in major label revenue. By contrast, "MySpace bands," as the site's publicist refers to them, keep production and promotion costs as low as possible. They give away their best two or three songs as downloads or streams and use social networking and email blasts to reach an audience hungry for new music. Converts become zealots, more than making up for any lost CD revenue through sales of concert tickets, T-shirts, messenger bags, hoodies, posters, and bumper stickers. With little fanfare, these groups are creating a new middle class of popular music: acts that can make a full-time living selling only a modest number of discs, on the order of 50,000 to 500,000 per release.