It’s Thursday night and I’ve been on MySpace for two hours, reading music blogs, listening to MP3s, and generally shirking responsibility. I’m learning quite a bit and having a fun time. MySpace is totally worth my time.

Take, for example, two bands that will be playing Club Pop! at Neumos this week: White Williams and Health. I have not seen either of these bands live, watched a music video promoting them or purchased their music. Yet, I listen to their music regularly and know a great deal about their touring schedules and the bands they associate with. This immersive music experience is quickly and easily available through MySpace.

The most innovate feature of MySpace is the personal page, the ubiquitous MySpace page that features not only information about an artist, but a list of “top friends” that gives some (often fecious) indication of who associates with whom. “Top friends” is what makes MySpace so social because it forces users to identify the boundaries of their social network, cultural milieu or fetish community. The inclusion and exclusion method of determining one’s top friends stimulates a hierarchy of association — an insidious, often very useful, popularity contest.

Once a music fan finds the MySpace of a band they like, they can usually find similar bands that share members, artistic influences or sexual partners. The information available on MySpace goes way beyond the traditional consumptive practices of buying albums and concert tickets. While it may be artificial, MySpace offers the tantalizing promise of becoming “friends” with your favorite band.

Nationally, the music business has recognized MySpace as a great way to market new bands to a larger and larger online audience. Recently, Seattle’s archaic folk group Fleet Foxes was featured on the MySpace music portal. As I write this article, the band announced that they’ve signed to the internationally renowned Seattle indie label, Sub Pop records.

Of course, with all new media, the measure of success is tenuous. Along with the “top friends” ranking system, there are numerous other quantitative measures of popularity with the MySpace music empire that may or may not have any bearing on reality.

On one section of MySpace’s music Web site that attempts to present MySpace as a cohesive Web site that contains all facets of popular music, artists are ranked according to some vague equation that combines number of friends, number of plays of songs (within MySpace’s music player) and Web site hits. This obscure calculation produces an artist ranking that puts artists like reality TV star Tila Tequila ahead of the Pixies in the ranking.

In fact, the skin-flaunting MySpace celebrity Tila Tequila, known for her soft-core promotional photos, her terrible music, and TV show, is the number one artist in the “unsigned” category, sharing the top spot in the three-column list with “indie” group Ying-Yang Twins and “major” label artist Akon.

What MySpace lacks in relevance to the American music industry makes up for it by allowing people to participate in foreign music culture and local music.

Diffused urban music communities based in traditional genres like hip-hop or techno are now largely maintained in virtual reality. Many cliques, venues, promoters, DJs and bands all communicate on MySpace to set up shows, comment on artistic trends and arrange meetings between artists. In Seattle, small venues and groups like Seattle DIY use MySpace as a forum for organizing events.

All this identification with the genre and style artists creates new opportunity for community. The new global French disco-house scene proudly traces its roots to MySpace marketing.

Of course, when Saturday rolls around again, I turn off my computer and catch a bus to Capitol Hill for some RL (real life) music fun. MySpace would mean nothing to me if I couldn’t go out into the night and see everyone I know from cyberspace, sweating and rocking out like real human beings.