My brush with the Wall Street Journal

Last week I started receiving correspondence from John Jurgensen, a staff writer with the Wall Street Journal. He was asking me questions regarding musical genres and the letter writing campaign I started to get MySpace to add a Nerdcore genre to their site.

The emails got pretty lengthy and I started to wonder if the whole piece was going to be about the campaign on MySpace. In the duration of the whole letter writing campaign, I had never heard a single thing from anyone directly affiliated with MySpace or News Corp. My buddy, and documentary filmmaker, Dan Lamoureux did have contact with some of MySpace’s marketing representatives about featuring the trailer for his upcoming documentary on the site though. During that time he mentioned the MySpace campaign and was told “Nerdcore ties in perfectly with myspace.” by the MySpace rep who later added “sometimes we start the process but it doesn’t go very far but we like nerdcore and we plan to add it.”

We felt like progress had been made, but the genre was never added.

In these recent emails with John (from the WSJ), I told him about our letter writing campaign and also mentioned the big campaign that Animal Style started last year to get Chiptunes added as a genre. John later shared with me a quote from Tom Anderson (via his publicist) about how supportive MySpace is of burgeoning musical styles;

” I just add them when users and bands send in requests. The way I see
it, almost any genre name is legitimate if people want to use it. We
have so many artists that it only helps to get very specific on the
style and classification of a band.”

If anyone is interested in bugging Tom about adding a nerdcore genre, feel free to use the “contact me” button on his MySpace profile, but that probably won’t get you anywhere.. according to the error message he hasn’t been accepting any emails since last December.

Attempting to contact anyone else at MySpace will only generate return messages with titles like “How to change your MySpace password”.

For anyone interested, the WSJ article is now online here. Although my name doesn’t appear anywhere in the article, they do mention the campaign and included a quote from MC Frontsawholebunch. It’s funny to think about how all that made it in after all those emails was just one paragraph on Nerdcore on MySpace.