Best Of 2013: How MySpace Totally Blew It’s Big Relaunch
Despite a beautiful looking redesign, the new MySpace has not gained any traction. Musicians and marketers that I've spoken to say they're not seeing any increased activity; and sadly, there's an absurdly simple reason behind MySpace's dead in the water re-start. As serial music tech entrepreneur and occasional Hypebot contributor Brenden Mulligan points out, "MySpace decided that they would erase the audience that the bands had built and ask them to start over…To put it simply, THEY DELETED THE F*CKING FANS."
Background
Even during it's multi-year decline, MySpace still had real traffic. Hundreds of thousands of musicians had created MySpace pages and posted tracks. In return, MySpace delivered traffic – hundreds of millions of fans. Even late last year, is you did a search on almost any band – particularly lesser known ones – and their often neglected MySpace page ranked in the top 5 results.
The New MySpace
"When MySpace finally started letting people in to experience the new site, we all realized the same thing. While it’s neat, it’s not easy to use and doesn’t feel like it’s worth rebuilding a social graph again," Mulligan, who founded and sold ArtistData and recently launched OneSheet, wrote on TechCrunch.
"As I played with the new site, I noticed I wasn’t connected to any bands or friends. I realized that my old account was under a different email address, so I signed out and tried to sign in with my old address. That didn’t work, but then I saw the option to use my old MySpace account," Mulligan continued. "I used my old email and password and then it became clear that while I was using my old credentials, it wasn’t really porting over my account. It was just letting me use the old login info…Then I saw the column on the right that prompted me to connect to certain artists. That was confusing to me. I’d been connected to them on MySpace before. Shouldn’t I still be connected to them?"
Bands Start With Zero Fans On The New MySpace
"…Getting musicians to care at all about MySpace again is a hard enough challenge. Getting them to care enough to try to rebuild a fan base on the platform is out of the question. And that’s what they’re expecting. Every musician starts out in the new MySpace with zero fans. They need to start from scratch. To tell their audience, 'Go back to MySpace and connect with us'." Mulligan cites these examples:
- Britney Spears has about 1.5 million friends on the old MySpace.
- She has fewer than 7,000 connections on the new MySpace.
- Justin Timberlake, the new MySpace creative's director and partner, has about 1.5 million friends on the old site.
- He has just 50,000 on the new.
Can MySpace Recover?
It's difficult to see how. "Musicians and entertainment professionals were the only real users MySpace had left. And the only reason they came was because they already had built an audience in MySpace’s heyday, concludes Mulligan. "Now, they have no reason to return."
If MySpace have started all over again, it might have been better. For me, looking at many old bandprofiles that havent been updated for years, is worse than not having those accounts available. They should’ve started on a fresh.
Lets not forget that a large amount of people had many photos and emails stored on what they thought were a safe place. I kept all my old emails and they were personal and now I have lost them forever. There are photos that I cannot retrieve and as long as Myspace strays in its current format they will struggle to get the majority of the users back. There was a rumour that they were going to allow users access to thier old mail and profiles but that appears to have fizzled out. I do not trust Justin Timberlake to stick by his word and give everyone access to thier old stuff. They say it has not been delted…just resatricted. If that is the case. throw the switch and let us have all our personal stuff back!
I, JaaDFire was considering adding more music to Myspace but is crazy, useless to put effort into a dead platform. I keep with my JaaDFire Facebookpage and JaaDFire Twitter page Those make sense for me and great article.
Im. Glad i didnt have anything personal on there. For if i did and it got deleted or even restricted, i think i would go hunting…loost my kids, if they deleted my kids pictures and its all i had… Well, whats the saying “dont pick on a man that has nothing left to loose?”
Didn’t this article get run before? 🙂
I still have the same amount of connections as before, they just aren’t all as active.
PS: Quit lyin’. Here’s Britney’s page:
https://myspace.com/britneyspears
People connected to her: 1,555,2222
Here’s Justin’s:
https://myspace.com/justintimberlake
People connected to him: 1,539,348
If you got paid to write this drivel, please I hope you get fired and they hire me, since I should get paid for the lousy job you didn’t do!
I had a band account. I am an unsigned musician who release my own albums, have no real fans, but I had many email correspondents to some of my idols who are world famous through the myspace messages, I even had comments from them on my channel telling me they enjoyed the music which weren’t bots or publicists, they were the actual band members. All these were deleted. I was in shock that they did that. That was the end of me using myspace. All my messages. No way to get them back or export them.