A&R opinion of bands on Myspace

Question: Surely you guys receive more demo submissions than you probably know what to do with... When Earache looks at a MySpace link from the demo section, are things that coincide with the music such as view count/image/presentation as important to you as other mainstream labels? Or does Earache rule so much they just like what they hear?

Answer: Nearly every band we look at on myspace now has 10,000 friends and 100,000 playcount and a neat CSS background and cool graphics and merch.Bands tend to blend into one another ans almost look and sound identical BUT we pretty much judge bands on the quality of music- the style, originality, level of professionalism.When we started to sign the new school Thrash bands the only place they existed was on myspace, but none had a great many plays or slick web pages- what attracted us was the music- it was good old fashioned A&R skill and sleuthing that alerted us to the potential of these bands.
To be honest most labels nowadays are doing A&R solely by myspace play count...or a basic search of myspace "unsigned" by descending playcount order- any monkey could do that, and many labels have hooked up with many bands in that fashion.