MySpace Cuts 66% Of International Staff
In a second wave of major restructuring, MySpace announced this morning that it will cut 300 of its 450 international staffers and close at least four overseas offices.. The moves on the heels of Facebook passing MySpacein both visitors and page views in the US and worldwide and just a week after the social networker reduced it's domestic head count by 30% cutting 420 staffers.
“With roughly half of MySpace’s total user base coming from outside the U.S., maintaining productive and efficient operations in our international markets is important to users worldwide and our immediate financial strength,” said MySpace Chief Executive Officer Owen Van Natta in a statement. “As we conducted our review of the company, it was clear that internationally, just as in the U.S., MySpace's staffing had become too big and cumbersome to be sustainable in current market conditions. Today’s proposed changes are designed to transform and refine our international growth strategy.”
Myspace lost it when they refused to update their design, to open up the data that artists had put on there to sharing, and didn’t bother trying to understand the changes in the nature of social networking that happened while they were spending their time shouting about being the biggest.
Myspace pages now look like Geocities pages – a sign of a naive time in the web’s recent past.
How to fix it? Make the music player, gig dates and blog headlines embeddable, make friend/follow asymmetric with easier ways to share music (maybe a ‘top 10 most recent bands I’ve dug’ plugin, with a ‘like this’ button on every artist page to feed it?), allow blogs to be auto-update via RSS feed, and sort out the basic design disasters, make hooking up twitter to the status a cinch, oh and do a deal with BandCamp to make it possible to replace the music player with a bandcamp embed… Basically, use some of those Murdoch millions to incorporate the best bits of reverb nation, last.fm, facebook and twitter. Or, alternatively, disappear. The choice is theirs 😉
I don’t think the problem has been technology-related so much as it has been spam and marketing-related. The noise and clutter level on MySpace is very high. Even if it made all of those music-related improvements, if people feel bombarded with lots of messages they don’t want, they aren’t going to hang out on MySpace.
On the other hand, if MySpace accepts that it isn’t going to be the social networking site people go to be with friends, and it switches its focus to being the biggest/best music site, then adopting technologies from other music sites might revive it.
Here’s an article that explains why MySpace had been popular with teens.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10265060-2.html
“We Gen Yers spent hours on MySpace customizing our profiles and making them perfect representations of us (or rather, who we wanted to be). We couldn’t wait for our friends to comment a new photo: ‘New pic, please comment!’ MySpace made many of us feel popular, or even famous. I remember posting a new profile picture and refreshing the page in anticipation of responses.”
She goes on to explain about their transition to Facebook. Music isn’t mentioned anywhere in the article.