All about groups

As a musician working in Second Life you tend to pick up a lot of group affiliations. Most of them are venues I play. They require group membership in order to rez my tip jar and whatever else I might have time to rez.

Of course belonging to theses groups has a downside. I get lots of notices I don’t need to get. I play Tantalus every Monday and because of this I get to hear about every time they need some dancers to cover and event. This seems to be a constant need. Multiply this by 18 and you have a good idea how many notices I have to clear every time I log on.

Some seem to feel musicians with a group are operating a “Vanity group”. In some cases this is true. There are some artists so aggressive in recruiting people to their group; it’s hard to see membership as anything more then a numbers game.

A good, or bad example of this is Newscore Pearl. He had a HUGE group membership number listed in his bio (I seem to recall it being like 2,000) and because of this number he was touting himself as the biggest thing in Second Life. Using group membership numbers to imply prestige is a very “MySpace” way of viewing things.

The following is just an observation. I have played a show that had a real “Open mic” after the featured player, and Newscore was hustling his act at this Open mic. The open mic portion is basically an audition. Why is the biggest act in Second Life auditioning? Also observed, for a guy with 2,000 group members only three seems to show up for his turn at the open mic.

I currently have 91 in my group; yes the number is going down. I don’t seem to be finding any new members. As you may recall I was hoping to have about 200 members by the end of the month. That does not seem likely at this point.

However while the group is not growing as I hoped it would, I still see it as my most valuable asset. I don’t see this as a vanity group because the only reason it exist is to notify people interested in my music where I’m playing and provide them with a landmark. In my opinion this prevents the group from being a Spam machine. If you are interested in information it’s not Spam.

There are some that feel musicians should just close down their personal groups and only post notices in groups like “Live music enthusiast”. But to post in the group I would have to belong to that group, and I really don’t need to be informed about every “So-called” live music event. I don’t need the Spam and I don’t think my fans should have to endure hundreds of superfluous notices to find out where I’m playing.

To put things into perspective, if I didn’t need to belong to venue groups to rez my tip jar my group list would be as follows. Zorch Nation, and POL. Everything other notice is just something I need to close without reading when I log in.