The Curious Case Of MySpace

MySpace. They’re a funny one aren’t they? What is it they do again? I don’t even think Tom knows anymore……. As CEO Mike Jones announces MySpace won’t be focussing on selling music, we examine what exactly is next for MySpace and whether there will be NoSpace left in the coming years for the former social networking powerhouse….. The first real social network success story, MySpace has been in steady decline since the heady days of 2008. At this time, MySpace was considered the leading social networking site and consistently beat main competitor Facebook in traffic. This all changed when Facebook launched a new set of features to attract a larger variety of users. Myspace found itself in a continuing decline of membership and by July 2010, the site was ranked 25th in Internet traffic, with Facebook second. Why did this happen then? The problem is, MySpace remained stagnate in the face of vast improvements by Facebook. It lost its identity and still hasn’t regained it to this day. MySpace became huge because it was the first big site where aspiring musicians could showcase themselves and even sell their music via download links. The networking side of MySpace was pretty weak and it wasn’t a big surprise that Facebook overtook them in this respect. Faced with a fresher competitor coming up and overtaking them, MySpace should have played to its strengths and tightened its grip on the music space. This never happened and now seems even more unlikely with CEO Mike Jones’ announcement. Although he pledged to try and build a community where fans can get informed on their favourite artists and find out about up and coming acts, Jones appears to be missing a trick with his admission that selling music isn’t important. iTunes obviously dominate the music downloads market, but their catalogue does have noticable holes in it and doesn’t provide the kind of ‘one stop shop’ MySpace could if they also focused on downloads. Showcasing big acts, then linking these to similar smaller acts could and should have been MySpaces angle. Breaking acts like Lily Allen should have been a legacy used to demonstrate credibility, making MySpace the first port of call for all music fans on the web. On that score, MySpace get a big fat FAIL. The future for MySpace looks pretty bleak, a perfect example of a good business model gone bad. Sadly it looks like MySpace might have NoPlace in the not too distant future….