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  • Ellen Wildhagen

At this point in time, MySpace has now been the butt of jokes for longer than it was the world's most popular social network.

But its influence on music lives on, not only in superstars like Nicki Minaj and Lily Allen, who got their big breaks on the site years ago, but in newcomers like Nic Hessler, a pop-rock wizard whose first full-length album only came out in March.

Hessler is 24 now, but in the mid-'00s, he was a teenaged home-recording enthusiast growing out of a punk phase and learning to love his mom's Beatles and Beach Boys albums. He spent his time online listening to bands on MySpace, scanning their "top friends" for record labels and other bands, and posting demos to his own profile.

That's how he stumbled upon Captured Tracks. The New York-based label is now a paragon of gauzy, '80s-vibed indie pop, but it was just beginning to build its empire when Hessler friended it on MySpace.

It worked out well.

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