The rise and fall of MySpace has been pretty well documented – twice. In 2006 Google and MySpace reached a blockbuster deal, with MySpace allowing Google to advertise on its site in return for $900 million. The site was quickly bogged down with excessive advertisements, resulting in a slow, seemingly counterintuitive platform. These pitfalls were accentuated by Facebook’s ever-expanding clean and intuitive design. Even to the novice, MySpace was doomed and becoming quickly irrelevant. However, while Facebook has made MySpace an inferior product for almost all players, the latter has continued to provide substantial traffic in a unique niche – for aspiring and acknowledged musicians.
MySpace had recreated itself in the social networking industry as a way for musicians and fans to connect; for early releases, news and giveaways. So with the release on the “New MySpace,” in September of 2012 – stewarded by one of the leaders in music, Justin Timberlake – one would imagine that the company would expand on strengths, appealing to the only audience they had left. Well, they didn’t. Big mistakes were made. Instead of augmenting their niche in the music industry, the New MySpace disconnected from their prior self, forcing users to reconnect with every friend and band they were associated with on the “old” site. Britney Spears had around 1.5 million friends on the old MySpace; she now has fewer than 7,000 connections. Similarly Justin Timberlake, the creative director and a partner of the New MySpace, had about 1.5 million connections, and now has only 50,000.
So the question now is, can MySpace recover again? It is extremely difficult to see how they can. The errors are not only strategic, of course, the damage to their brand is almost beyond definition. The very last audience MySpace had, the music industry, now has little incentive to continue its use it. And where MySpace falls short, its biggest competitor, Facebook, has grown – gobbling up its real estate and users like PacMan chasing ghosts. Facebook is continuing to up the ante and grow its connections with sites like SoundCloud and Spotify, allowing for easy to use, intuitive sharing of music, targetting up-and-coming and well-known artists.
Today’s digital world is about conglomeration and collaboration, a worldwide effort towards expansion; and that is where the “Old” and the “New” MySpace BOTH fall short. As Facebook has embraced the production of applications from outside sources, MySpace stayed in-house. Shawn Gold, MySpace’s former head of marketing and content said, “MySpace went wide – and not deep enough – in its product development. We went with a lot of products that were shallow and not the best products in the world.”
And oh yes, they forgot to cater to their audience.
Kelli Richards,
CEO of The All Access Group, LLC
