I saw Karmella's Game in what looked like a converted basement rec room in the very early hours of Wednesday morning. Their set was great, despite the crap venue. Their singer is probably less than five feet tall, but even without an actual stage to perform on, she put on a high-energy show and got the whole crowd going. I wish I'd been able to get some video, but there were too many conspicuous hipsters in front of me, and not enough light to get anything worthwhile. I highly recommend this band to fans of indie girls with big synth stacks, but that's not really the point of this post.

Before things got started, the frontwoman of the second band on the bill (Hello, Trauma, whose very first show it was) came up to me and asked if I was on their myspace page. I was not, but I told her I'd just seen this coincidental shirt. Turns out I look like someone on their myspace page.

In between the first two sets I got to talking to one of the guys from a band called Dormlife, of Chicago, as well as a couple guys from a not-really-doing-anything Madison band, and one of those guys' girlfriend. Madison band guy, 23, was impressed with the success of Dormlife guy, 22. "How do you make a living on tour?" inquired Madison band guy. "You don't," sez Dormlife guy, tellin' it like it is. "How do you even set up a tour?" Madison band guy wonders, undeterred. "Are you on myspace?"

Long story short, Dormlife and Karmella's Game became tourmates, briefly, after becoming myspace friends. Karmella's Game was in Madison -- their first Wisconsin show -- because Hello, Trauma's Mikelanne had hooked shit up via myspace. It appears that, in the span of about two years, myspace has come to own The Scene.

As of very recently, News Corp. (aka Rupert Murdoch, aka Fox, aka The Evil That Men Do) owns myspace.

Is this the final penstroke in the corporatization of indie rock? Myspace (and, to a lesser extent, Purevolume) is where most bands are making music available these days, using myspace's Flash-based streaming player (which automatically plays when you load a myspace profile page -- hello, usability!), as opposed to posting downloadable MP3's on their own sites or, frankly, anywhere else.

Is this really the way to spread music in the iPod age, by sending music on a web page to tinny computer speakers and trapping it there? But myspace isn't really for spreading music -- it's a social network enabler, there to build The Scene. You could see there, as the sixty or so non-performers milled about, late Tuesday night. I believe that, with the exception of myself, everyone there was a friend or a "friend" of the bands on the bill. Karmella's Game is not a big enough act to attract a large crowd on their own popularity (I only know about them because somebody posted their EP on a bittorrent site with a description that referenced either Ozma or Motion City Soundtrack), and this show only started to get advertised last Saturday.

So maybe this is great for Hello, Trauma, who weren't that good, but who had tons of friends cheering them on, but what about Dormlife? If live performance is more about creating in-groups than about sharing and enjoying music, how do you make a living on tour? If this kind of insularity, soon to be wholly corporatized, is the future, you don't.