Last month, MySpace did the music world a favor and disabled autoplay on their profiles, saving the world from crimes against music being commited by bored 16 year-olds that have Garage Band and an Attack Attack! album. Although it hasn’t even been a month, the number of plays on MySpace has dropped dramatically. Media tracking company Big Champagne found that plays in August dropped 20.7 percent from July.
The company canvassed thousands of top artists on MySpace Music, convering the most heavily-tracked names. In July, it showed 1.436 billion plays. In August, it had dropped to 1.138 billion. This is pretty notable, given than they didn’t disable autoplay until around August 18. The bigger picture is that many visitors to a band’s MySpace page might not actually care much about the music, and if anyone has been using number of plays from a band to judge their influence and popularity, they might have to re-examine that.
