Since bands often post their tour schedules on MySpace (and sometimes nowhere else), I decided to do some detective work to see if I could find some useful RSS feeds on News Corporation’s erstwhile social networking site. Much to my unastonishment, MySpace seems to have no RSS feeds whatsoever, (if you know of some that I missed, feel free post in the comments). However, not being one to give up that easily, a little intrepid Googling brought me straight to the MySpace Feed Creator at MakeDataMakeSense.com. It turns out that you can take the MySpace URL of your favorite band or comedian and punch it in over here (http://makedatamakesense.com/myspace/event/) to create a feed. Then, once you get your resulting RSS feed, (which looks a little bit ugly in its native state), you can take it over to Feedburner.com and create an identical feed that looks a little more user friendly, something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/miraclefortress, for instance. Finally, once you’ve got your Feedburner feed up and running, click on the Publicize tab and activate the email subscription service. Once the email subscription service is active, you can then use your own email address to subscribe to your newly burned feed and just like that, gig updates should start arriving in your inbox in no time. (Actually, a message will only be delivered to you if your favorite band’s feed has been updated on that day. No new content, no email for you). If you don’t want email updates, you can just use a regular RSS reader to subscribe to your new feed and track things that way. In theory (and in practice), bands can even republish the link to their newly created MySpace/Feedburner RSS feeds on their non-MySpace websites. Until then, happy MySpace feed burning everyone!

PS Hey MySpace, why not get off your ass and publish some RSS feeds of your own!

Note: This article was based in part on Steve Rubel‘s useful article, “Turn Gmail (or any E-mail Account) Into a Social Network Hub“.

Note 2: This whole process will crumble like a deck of cards if MakeDataMakeSense.com ever changes their MySpace Feed Creator or if MySpace changes the layout of their gigs calendar.