Popular social networking website MySpace currently has almost 270 million accounts, with over 50 million of those added in the last 4 months. This means that nearly half a million new accounts are being added each day. If this rate of growth is maintained MySpace could be boasting over half a billion accounts by the middle of 2008. Many of those profiles are maintained by bands and musicians listed on this website.

One of the features of the MySpace website is the ability to add so called friends. The image below shows a portion of a screen grab from the Newcastle Music Directory MySpace profile at myspace.com/newcastlemusic showing that at the time it had 680 “friends”.

Another piece of information contained on artists profiles is the date the band established its MySPace profile. For example, the image below shows a portion of the Silverchair profile at myspace.com/silverchair showing that they had signed up on the 5^th of April 2006.

Using these two pieces of information, ie the number of friends and the signup date, it is possible to calculate how many friends per day have been added for that account.

The profiles of a large sample of artists from this website were surveyed on two occasions, the 11^th of September and the 8^th of November 2007, with the analysis of 1490 and 1526 profiles respectively on each occasion.

The following table shows the artists with the highest average number of friends added per day since they joined MySpace.

This is an interesting measure of how each artist uses the MySpace website. The number of friends added per day as calculated in the table is represented in the chart below. Several bands were not included in the first survey but had been included in the analysis by the time of the second. The vertical scale of the chart was truncated to 50 friends/day so that detail could be seen for the lower values.

Basically there are two mechanisms by which a friend may be added, an incoming request or an outgoing request.

In the case of Silverchair, an internationally well known band, one would assume that most of the friend requests would be incoming. That is to say that other MySpace users arrive at the Silverchair profile and click the “Add Friend” icon so that they may receive bulletins etc in order to keep up to date with what Siverchair are doing. There must be someone very dedicated who operates that profile on behalf of the band, checking and authorising almost 170 profiles per day. Lets assume that it takes about 20 seconds to check a profile, and approve it as a friend then this represents approximately 1 hour per day just approving profiles. Then there would be the other tasks such as moderating comments and maintaining the information on the profile.

The high numbers of friends per day for both Kasey Chambers and Catherine Britt are also largely due to fans providing incoming friend requests.

In the case of the other artists listed in the table above, one would assume that a large proportion of their friends were gained by outgoing requests, ie, the band themselves finds suitable profiles and adds them to their list of “friends” in order to promote themselves. The table above provides quite an insight as to which local bands are the most active in this regard on MySpace.

If we take the example of Jeriko, a Newcastle based band who joined MySpace on the 25th of August 2007. The band was found to be adding friends at the rate of approximately 45 per day in the first survey, but this had dropped off dramatically by the time of the second survey. This is most probably because the band members have extensive experience performing in local bands that have existing MySPace profiles. The band members could easily go through the friend lists of their previous bands and readd them to the Jeriko profile one by one. Once heir existing friends lists had been exhausted the process of adding additional friends would become much slower, or perhaps stop entirely.

Short Stack stand out in the above analysis for another reason. They have been members of the MySpace website since the 8th of October 2005. They have been adding friends at the rate of approximately 24 per day for over 2 years, amassing a list of friends that is now approaching 18,000 in number. If we assume that the time takes to find a suitable profile, wait for it to load, and add that person as a friend might take approximately 30 seconds, and that 80% of Short Stack’s friends were added by Short Stack themselves, this amounts to a total of 150 hours of friend adding. Granted, this was occurred over 2 years, but still an impressive feat.

Another interesting example is Thoughts Of A Dream, who, after signing up to MySpace in July 2005 had amassed over 12000 friends at the time of writing. This equates to a rate of 14.6 per day on average throughout that entire period. Interestingly though, 3650 of those friends were added in the time between the two surveys, a period of 58 days. Therefore, during the period between the two surveys, Thoughts Of A Dream were adding friends at a rate of almost 63 per day, a rate that eclipses every other band analysed except for Silverchair.

While some of these calculations were made using some rough assumptions, other aspects, such as the signup date of each of the bands and the number of friends at the time of each survey, are very accurate.

So … how many friends per day have YOU added?