I don’t like making predictions, but I’m going to make one for social media (and in conjunction music industry) this year: Myspace is going to die.  In some ways Myspace is already dead.  People and fans no longer sign in and bands have given up on using it to promote themselves.  I hate to use this grim analogy, but if you’ve ever had someone who you were close to on the brink of death for a long period of time, often times you’ve already said goodbye even though they’re still living and breathing.  That is Myspace today.

Early History Of Myspace

Myspace was born in 2002-2003 as an improvement to Friendster.  The whole point of Myspace was to have your own personalized website that displayed your profile and allowed you to connect to people you knew.  Over time Myspace evolved and it became easier to connect and find your friends, post pictures and videos, give updates on your life, blog, create events, and interact all in one space online.

In 2005, Rubert Murdoch of News Corp, bought Myspace for a then $649 million. Once bought up, it was apparent that there were conflicting visions of what Myspace should become.  Murdoch thought of it as a market place to sell stuff while Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson thought of it as a social space.  Wherever Myspace was going it was going in the right direction it seemed.  Its 100 millionth user user signed-up in 2006.  Myspace was the king of social media.

Myspace and Music

One of the more unique features Myspace offered was to musicians.  Bands and artists were able to set up a profile that had a layout which included a music player and calendar of show dates.  Fans of a band could friend their favorite bands and have a very direct line of communication with them and get real time updates.  In many cases, it was the first time fans did not have a barrier to bigger name acts.  In this 2006 interview, Chris DeWolfe talks about this feature:

“I understood the macro trends of the music business. Labels were signing fewer acts, giving them less time to prove themselves and spending less money on marketing. We saw a need to develop a community for artists to get their music out to the masses.” – Chris DeWolfe, 2006 Forbes.com

I can remember setting my music page up in early 2007.  I would manually enter every show.  I would post bulletins of where and when I was playing.  People would comment or say hello to me on my page.  I’d say something back.  I started blogging here and there.  For a while it was fun.

And then it turned ugly.  Maybe ugly is the wrong word–more time than necessary was spent maintaining my account.  For one, unknown artists used their Myspace account as a spamming game.  Have more friends and your band looked good.  I can remember getting “friend requests” from all sorts of bands with music I didn’t really listen to in the first place.  Over time the spamming got more specialized–”buy our album”, “come to our show”!! “Hey, we don’t know you and you don’t know us but we’re sending you this anyway”–became the slogan of Myspace music in my humble opinion.  So was it any surprise that people started blocking requests from bands and not engaging with you (and for the record, it was not just musicians spamming.  There was porn, and A LOT of that, along with other spams and scams)?

* Note: I’ll be writing a follow up post more on the music angle soon.

Sorry! An unexpected error has occurred. This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group (and Other Reasons for the Fall of Myspace)

Graph from Ignite Social Media.

Why did Myspace start dying shortly after 2007 (as the graph above shows)? There are too many reasons to list and people probably have their own personal reasons, so not every single one of them is in here.  And I would guess there may be a tell all book in the next couple years from the insider point of view.  Here’s a list with some explanation, feel free to comment a reason I may have missed on here:

- Functionality: well, if the heading of this section is any indication, Myspace had errors fairly frequently.  I recall several times posting pictures or video and getting an error only to have to repeat the multi-clicking process of trying it again.  The more this happened the more people stopped using certain features and stopped signing in at all (because sometimes you couldn’t sign in).

- Interface: although people had some control over how their profile looked, some just became a clusterf*ck of stuff.  Pages could go on and on down the screen filled with videos, comments, your top 50 friends, and stuff the majority of people did not care about.  Although content is key in social media, pages needed new content.  Why should I have to go looking on your page for the new video you put up amongst all the other “crap”?

- Bureaucratic feel: how many clicks would it take to do something?  Quite a few and more than was necessary.  When interacting with someone it would give you a message that that person had to “approve” what you just did.  Also, even today Myspace is SLOW AS HELL to load anything.  Anytime something becomes bureaucratic it loses any sense of efficiency and the element impacted most is time.  People were tired of the extra time it took to do what were simple tasks.

- Facebook: this is a no brainer.  Facebook made up for what Myspace lacked, especially around user friendliness.  One key was that content was new and fresh everyday.  It was easy to post your thoughts, a video or photo and share it.  The flow of content went along with our ADD society.  People’s profile pages were broken up with tabs so that information and content was more easily digestible.  In herd mentality fashion, people headed over to what was better.

- Twitter: which is still growing and is a leading source of news content.  It’s as simple as pie to use, with far less of the gadgets and gizmos Myspace had.  Which brings me to my next point.

- Myspace tried to be everything to everyone: I’ll take a quote from 37Singals book ‘Rework‘, “You can turn a bunch of great ideas into crappy product real fast by trying to do them all at once.  You just can’t do everything you want to do and do it well.”  I think that sums it up.

- Rupert Mudoch: I may be off base saying this, but the owner of New Corp (which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal) probably did not understand social media as well as he should have in the first place.   Myspace made it’s money from advertisements, which over time became targeted for the user.  But often times these targeted ads were not what people wanted or needed, which turned people off.  Furthermore, most people I would presume were not on Myspace to buy anything.  It became about the money for those running Myspace.  This broke down the trustworthiness of Myspace as a place to be social.

- Turnover at the Top: Chris DeWolfe resigned in April 2009, Owen Van Natta (formerly of Facebook) stayed briefly, and Tom Anderson (everyone’s first friend on Myspace) does not have as much involvement.  I’m not sure what these guys stories are, but either they stopped believing in their vision or other people inside stopped believing in them.

- The latest overhaul did nothing: This past fall, Myspace overhauled their site.  Gave it a new look.  Gave more options for a profile page.  “Mashed it up” with Facebook.  Tried to lure us back.  But the feel and flow of it has not changed.  People did not really go back and if they did, not for very long.

The End?

As we speak Myspace plans on cutting its workforce in half this month and hopes to sell sometime this year.  Who will buy up Myspace and what exactly will happen will be told in time.  Perhaps it will rise from the dead as something completely new.  My take is that the name Myspace and everything it tied to be will be shut down at some point.  It will go away.  But like I said before, for millions of people, it already has.

So here lies Myspace.  There is a lot to learn from the life of Myspace.  My next post will focus on what the death of Myspace means for musicians and how to take all the assets it still has on your profile and put them to better use.