I'm trying to understand this MySpace Music thing

Ok, I get a lot of what’s going on with MySpace Music and I get a lot of what’s not going on as well. As part of my MySpace experiment on Strategize, I’m playing around a lot with MySpace Music because music is my business.

Here’s what I think about:

Stars Hide Fire has some really good music. Their profile on MySpace has 77,00 views. Their 2 songs have 29,000 combined plays. They have 6,210 MySpace friends. Does this mean that someone in the live music business on the East Coast should be paying attention to booking these guys? After all, with as many friends and views and plays as this band has on their MySpace site, which doesn’t even count their website, shouldn’t this be a good regional booking if not a good national club booking?

The problem with the logic above is that it does not seem like anyone is running any sort of correlation data for MySpace metrics against live music sales. I’m not talking about measuring the power of nationally touring acts like Green Day, I’m talking about measuring the power of MySpace for emerging, regional, and local bands in a quantifiable way. What people like me want to know is how many friends or profile views or song plays it takes to indicate a successful band.