406 bands who Twitter. Amusing to see how many bands have adopted micro-blogging as a promotional tool. It took me a while to understand the effectiveness of Twitter, much less the point. At first, I thought it was just another narcissistic cesspool like a MySpace or a Facebook, which, I suppose, on some level it is. But forcing people to be concise is a creative challenge that seems potentially worthwhile. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that. Worst case, it’s only 140 characters maximum. How bad could it be? I follow a few bands, and some are better at it than others. The bands that provide useful, newsworthy information, like Sonic Youth, are more fun than the ones who twitter things like “drinkin’ a beer.” The downside is that it can become a means of unwanted spam from slews of shitty bands trying to get you to follow them. But it’s easy enough to ignore them.