It’s too late for MySpace

Posted by Fred Oliveira on June 25, 2010 | Comments (34)

This was the scenario a few years ago: Myspace had it pretty good – the music industry was all over it. Any artist had to have a profile. Everyone had an account. Those that didn’t at least visited it for the latest updates from their friends, family or favorite artists. It was messy, it was huge.

Fast forward to today: the audience is on Facebook and Twitter, the artists are too, daily pageviews are going down quick (see the chart below, off of Alexa), and they’re out of the game. Myspace has simply become irrelevant. This post attempts to explain why, from the perspective of a designer and developer who also happens to be a part of the music industry, and an old user of the site.

Above: daily pageviews graph for myspace.com. Also, proof of impending doom.

What was once interesting now is just clutter

For as long as I can remember people talking about Myspace, one of the main conversation topics was Myspace’s customization, and how it allowed for some pretty crazy pages. Some considered it interesting, some considered it chaotic and problematic. I’d say it was once the first, and now the latter. After years of inconsistency and injecting CSS+HTML into random profile fields (which in its time created a big market for “profile editors”), people just got tired of it.

We live in an age of information overload, when the time to “figure things out” or “deal with the unknown” is shrinking down to zero – fast. So it makes sense that the audience has tired of the chaos, and that artists have simply abandoned hope that things would get simpler. There’s just no time for the customization craze anymore – not when other sites (where the audience actually is) do it faster.

People don’t “get” Myspace anymore

… because Myspace doesn’t get itself. What is it? What’s their motto? What problem are they solving? Who and what are they connecting? No one in the audience has a clue and I’m guessing (although it is an informed guess) not many in the company do either. It’s not for music, it’s definitely not for social sharing, so what is it for?

Myspace needs to get their shit together and figure this out. They are scraping other products for ideas (stream from twitter, messaging and apps from Facebook, etc) and failing at imitation (seriously, go try those out). It comes as no surprise that they should be investing their time and money in doing one thing extremely well – which is what Twitter and Facebook do.

They haven’t used their own product in a while

Everyone loves their baby, even if it’s ugly. And there has to be a lot of love here, because that is what MySpace is – ugly. Myspace is like a flash from a (now hopefully) distant past of bad UI and a disregard for user experience. They simply haven’t stopped and admired their creation in a very long time. Myspace needs one day where everyone stops working on whatever they do, and simply navigates the site. A day when they go through the pain they are putting their remaining users through.

An example: They recently relaunched their events functionality. Here’s a second informed guess: the number of events being added to Myspace went down dramatically. Why? Adding an event took 30 seconds a couple of months ago. Now it takes 5 minutes of going through 3 pages of fields, filling every single one (because they’re mandatory), while not having a clue as to how it’ll actually look on a profile. They. Simply. Haven’t. Tested it.

In conclusion

It’s too late for these guys. Users have no patience for the site anymore, and their employees clearly don’t either. There’s no apparent product roadmap. They’re not innovating. I can’t help but think they’re the Geocities of today. Michael Arrington said a few days ago that Myspace was like the Titanic, and I have to agree. I can only imagine people are getting on their lifeboats and rowing the hell away from it. The public and music industry sure have saved themselves a long time ago.

The image for this post comes from developer-myspace.com.

Comments on this post

Interesting to see GarageBand shutting down at the same time (http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/24/garageband/). Looks like this is a big opportunity for either LastFM, Facebook or someone else that get how the music environment works.

Personally I don’t see bands having their online identities on facebook (probably the platform that allows them to reach more users) just because of the uniform white-and-blue design. And I don’t see facebook allowing customization like MySpace did.

Maybe someone else has the idea to do a new artist-listener relationship oriented platform on top of Facebook APIs and Social Graph, and let artists have their own webpages with merch and music shopping integrated.

I loved MySpace.
I customized my profile so much, it was insane.
Actually, I made a few thousand dollars a year making custom pages!

My own profile was completely custom and I loved it from a designer’s perspective.

Also, I had over 500 people subscribed to my MySpace blog, which I used to post artists I found off of MySpace. I got so many connections from MySpace artists and would bookmark them according to genre. It was a great experience. It’s also how I met Blaze, whom I’d go on to do great things with…

MySpace became TERRIBLE when they tried to be EVERYTHING.
MySpace Books? MySpace Comedy? Please.
The GUI and user experience became UGLY and BLOATED.

Instead, they should have stream-lined the look, made it simpler & easier to use… while retaining core features. They could have slowly and carefully added a few new features, but they didn’t.

Picture tagging was nice, as was Profile Music Player.
Profile editor was good, too… but should have stuck to a FIXED WIDTH, 2-column layout.

MySpace doesn’t get it.
They had a key advantage over Facebook of MUSIC.
They should have used that to make it everyone’s “music networking” site.
But they didn’t!

It’s been hard for music artists, but eventually Facebook will implement a better system for music artists.

Moullinex is a perfect example:
http://www.facebook.com/Moullinex#!/Moullinex?v=app_178091127385

A “band page” should be part of Facebook, not just a 3rd-party application.
It should be an integral part of the Facebook experience, along with a Profile Music Player on everyone’s profile.

Also, Fan-Pages are a waste of time and Groups should be marketed to bloggers and music artists as a way to mass-message their fans. Fan-Pages do nothing. They are just tacky things people join but never really get content from. Groups are very useful as an opt-in, opt-out, mass-messaging format.

Sadly, Facebook is limiting when it comes to HTML, CSS, and attaching images/music to messages. If the profiles had a tad more customization, the music was better implemented, and services were used in a way that brought more people together to share what they liked, Facebook could COMPLETELY replace MySpace.

MySpace is dead, Twitter has its own market, and Facebook needs to expand its capabilities to satisfy music artists… (at least, that’s my opinion)

//

Where does Alexa get it’s information. I spend between 5 and 10 hours a day on MySpace and find the community alive and thriving. Maybe you should look for another source?

I’ve designed dozens of band sites for MySpace and thus have been forced to use it regularly for many, many years, and I couldn’t agree more with this post. MySpace is the new Geocities.

Myspace failed for the same reason that Facebook will fail. They aren’t curbing spam. I’m tired of having t o delete tons of irrelevant ads in my in box (one-by-one) so i give up on them. Also the focus on music didn’t follow through for myspace. Its been dead for a long time now.

I am a musician and I have a long unattended site on myspace. I stopped using it a while ago because it lost the genuine human connection it had at the beginning and turned a whole lot of would be musician who could play two chords into ruthless marketers. This meant that it became near impossible to stumble upon great music anymore, for all the onslaught of very bad music/marketing, and harder to link with like minds because mail and posts became 99% shameless marketing. Sad.

Kudos! for bringing this news, and yes I use myspace to promote my music.
you can also visit me at http://bubbleslove.wordpress.com

Donna: Here’s an explanation of how Alexa gets its data. It is certainly not 100% accurate, but I’m sure you’ll find that the trend is actually real. See also Quantcast or maybe Compete too.

If Myspace does work for you, I’m glad. It doesn’t work for the majority of people anymore, and that’s what this post is about.

The only time I really still use MySpace is to check out musician’s songs and maybe get some bio info. Kind of amazing how many artists still use it as their main page. I’m liking ReverbNation a lot these days as a music focused site. Lots of tools!

Facebook Fan pages for music could have been a good thing but they ruined it with their conversion to the “Like” system. Because Facebook has become a daily part of people’s lives, and is integrated with their real-life social world in a way that MySpace never achieved, it made sense to me to migrate my online musical presence to Facebook. I chose the “Fan” page over the “Group” because I could have special features on the fan page, specifically the music player. The music player was kind of flakey but I assumed they would fix it eventually, and I figured out how to supplement it with a SoundCloud app.

HOWEVER — the new “Like” system, with it’s attempt to be integrated into the web at large, and it’s integration into people’s profile likes really limits Facebook’s value to musicians.

Ever since the change I have been LOSING fans. Why? Paradoxically, it’s because I now show up in their personal profile description in the list of bands their favorite bands. Like next to The Beatles and Death Cab For Cutie. Most of my facebook fans have been friends, or friends of friends, or someone who saw me once at a show, etc…. Joining my fan page held a separate meaning from putting me in a list of their top favorite bands EVER. So they delete me.

So, yes, MySpace seems dead, nobody except other bands goes there anymore. I can host my music for free at SoundCloud.com and plenty of other places. Facebook is dropping the ball…

So… what’s it gonna be now?

I agree, especially with the observation that the site has become chaotic and problematic.

May I just say that when I briefly and sporadically used MySpace (starting in ’06 and ending in ’07), one of my first posts was “Why my MySpace Page Isn’t ‘Pimped Out.’” Because my profession was listed as “graphic designer”, I often enough had inquiries as to why my page was very sparse with no graphics, absolutely no flash, and 2 – 3 small photos at most (not of me with a beer in hand or at some raucous club). When people posted those neon flash greetings on my wall, I deleted them. Some called my page boring and one person even said my Graphic Design & Multimedia degree was “obviously wasted”. My post to address these comments was as minimal and straightforward as my intentionally bare design. It said: Less is more.

When Facebook came along, they definitely had a more concise vision. They’ve built a brand. Now everyone has the same white sparse page, same font, same size. It allows greater focus and interest. I think its clarity is one of its strengths.

That being said, it’s only been a year since I registered with Facebook. Even then, I use it only to organize an annual event for Relay For Life which happens in the summer. Since last August, I’ve checked my account (3) times (although I shall be checking it more often as we gear up for another fundraiser). I suppose that because all my businesses have online social profiles, I’m not keen on keeping one personally. I figure that the people I want to hear from and that want to hear from me, already have my phone number. And instead of uploading my entire photo album and unsuccessfully trying to instruct my grandma how to view photos of my children, I just send her the photos in the mail (no, not email) instead. Perhaps someone should invent a paper phone book and post office!

Disclosure: The vast majority of my businesses are web-based. So I love the internet. But I also love to unplug. Don’t you?

As much as I’d love to make MySpace disappear from my life, my page comes up 2nd in Google search results. I don’t think that many people click on it, but there are still people who want to hear a bands most recent hand picked songs, and you at least know what you’re getting into at MySpace. To deal with it, I trimmed all the fat off my page so it loads decently fast, and then put all my other links on there so they’ll go to the places I’m most active online, which definitely isn’t MySpace.

I’m more on Myspace then Facebook. I can do more on Myspace than I can do on Facebook.
The networking there is great, along with meeting new people from all aspects of the world, some who become your
friends.
I agree with Kiyoshi on this part “MySpace became TERRIBLE when they tried to be EVERYTHING.
MySpace Books? MySpace Comedy? Please.
The GUI and user experience became UGLY and BLOATED.”

Dont forget to add Myspace Records. They bombard us with too much stuff, which can become annoying at times.
I agree with this also, “Picture tagging was nice, as was Profile Music Player.
Profile editor was good, too… but should have stuck to a FIXED WIDTH, 2-column layout.”
I do not like the type of layout they have not, I’d rather like Kiyoshi says “stick with a fixed width, 2-column layout.

” Fan-Pages are a waste of time and Groups should be marketed to bloggers and music artists as a way to mass-message their fans. Fan-Pages do nothing.” I dislike the “I LIKE” pages, I’d rather it say “Add To Friends” on all pages.

Give or take Facebook a few years they will get just like Myspace, they are already heading in that particular direction right now.
Most of all my friends on Myspace has a Facebook page. Facebook gears more towards people getting to know people, like a community thing for friends and family, finding a long time friends you’ve lost contact with.
Myspace is more a place where you can network with people on a business term, and do business. With the type of business that I’m in, I choose Myspace over Facebook anyday.

Over all I pick MYSPACE over FACEBOOK in a hurry.

First of all, this is not a MySpace vs XPTO deal. MySpace wasn’t created for bands and musicians but because of the timing of its success (right at the boom of social media), it just fostered those who used it in that way. What happened was they were the only ones left after a while. People were using MySpace for the bands and music *only*. That was the start of the demise.

On the positive side, there have always been nice social networks focused on musicians. Interestingly, Virb was one of them but is now generalizing and trying to attract more users outside of the music type. They appear to have learned their lesson from MySpace, if you ask me. But many other music-driven have been out there. At this point in time, if you’re a musician, you should be on SoundCloud these days… http://soundcloud.com
The site is getting traction with electronic music producers and has *by far* the best interaction for bands and listeners. I can see it having a bright future.

I’m surprised http://www.bandcamp.com hasn’t come up. Band Camp is really excellent, really artist-based. In terms of music, no where comes close in my opinion. Grooveshark and Soundcloud are cool too.
It’ll be interesting to see were social media is in 2 years.

Thanks Fred. Did you notice this failure or myspace after newscorp bought it? Does it create any theories that money ruins everything? As sites get bigger, popular, success stories attract other people to it and it turns into a way to promote the hell out of your band, then it seems to go downhill fast. Quite the paradox. I wonder if anybody has done a study of has been Internet sites, and create a do’s and dont’s list? I couldn’t believe the way that bands promoted the shit out of themselves on myspace and now on facebook. Whatever happened to playing it cool? Bring back Fonzie. Of course we’d need the editors in 1984 to erase history so we forget about his jumping the shark snafu.

My space has become too cluttered……and for music artist, God only knows why they revamped
their profile settings, and trying to list your schedule of performances is wayyyyy too much hassle
now. THEY SHOULD’VE LEFT WELL ENOUGH ALONE. IF IT AIN’T BROKE DON’T FIX IT.

Artists should try audiofarm.org. Easy to use and you can sign in with Facebok or Twitter (or register at the site).

Very interesting, I absolutely agree. But FB isn’t much better for musicians. Greg Dember (his comment above) describes it perfectly.
When I started my musician page I was extremely disappointed with FB’s event posting process, it couldn’t get any worse- until MySpace COPIED it.
from the Alexa article “Now it takes 5 minutes of going through 3 pages of fields, filling every single one (because they’re mandatory), ” exactly. and same as FB.
Absolutely a big fat pain in the ass, especially when you have to update on multiple sites- Dear GOD! Does anyone look at my iLike page? maybe they do but after MySpace , FB and my own website I just can’t be bothered to update anything else. Not to mention upload new songs, videos and photos.
Will somebody PLEASE create a system for updating and uploading to multiple social sites/music platforms la dee dahs ALL AT ONCE?! You will have the undying love of every musician in the world and probably make some good money too.
–Another complaint about MySpace, until about a month ago they stored all your past events data, it was my one reliable source for 5 years of touring, then it all disappeared. Could they have warned us? Yes. Now when chasing PRS and my publisher asks me about a show I did two years ago in Yorkshire, I can’t tell him that he’s got the wrong venue, or that it was canceled etc… YES, stupid me for letting it all sit there, but it worked for so long, why should I imagine that it would stop….?

“Most of my facebook fans have been friends, or friends of friends, or someone who saw me once at a show, etc…. Joining my fan page held a separate meaning from putting me in a list of their top favorite bands EVER. So they delete me.”

YES. I’ve been doing that too. Under my music section I had listed my all time favorite artists. Separately I would become a fan of a local band because a friend was in it. But when Facebook moved those into my music section and implied that I liked a local band as much as the Beatles, I deleted almost all of those local bands.

I feel like myspace could turn it around if they simplified their user experience and focused their content on music. Musicians are the only ones who desperately want myspace to be revived and are the only ones with motivation to attempt to drive people back to the site.

A few months back myspace changed their music search function making it almost impossible to find unknown bands without knowing their URL. They changed it so the search function only shows you the top bands in each genre or region. It almost completely ruined artist’s abilities to network with each other and for fans to find local music or unknown artists in a genre they like. This was a bad move. Now, the ONLY way a band can be noticed is to spam.

I agree, Myspace is dead. I’ll still go on it once a week to make a new layout designs with divs and whatnot, but i certinately don’t go on there to socialise.

At the moment, Facebook is where it’s at, but give it a couple years it too will die. Already with all this changing with liking/becoming a fan is making people angry.

Yes, sites need to keep updating and changing, but if something was working why bother it. Soon you’ll be able to customise your own Facebook profile, i’m sure of it, and that will defintely not help the situation.

i still think myspace is a good site. i actually like designing the page. what spoilt it for me was the game apps. it took over true friend requests and bulletins. it still has more than twitter has.

While we’re at it — here’s another annoying thing about FaceBook music pages. Events management. I have learned that it is better for me to create my gig Events and manage them from my PERSONAL facebook page than from my music page. From my personal profile page, Facebook allows me to go back into events I’ve created and send out group emails to people who have registered for the event. For some unknowable reason, if you create an event based in your actual music page, you are not permitted to send follow-up emails to the people who have registered as YES or MAYBE. These are people who would WANT to know, maybe details have changed, or whatever. It’s not spam.

So, now I’m in the stupid situation of having a music “fan” page on facebook, but managing and promoting all of my events from my personal page, and not even LISTING the events on the music page, so as not to create duplication and/or have a list of gigs where it looks like nobody said they were coming.

I know that there are other music-oriented sites coming up, and even MySpace still has its strengths, but see… I really WANT Facebook’s music page feature to work, because at least in my world, Facebook is the only place where REAL people (not just music crazies) go for their social networking.

I think Facebook should just have one page for every presence on the web. Bands should have one page and socialize there, individuals or solo artists should also just have one page and keep everyone, their friends, family, fans all updated from that one page. Facebook should have a music player that works and allows you to upload your original songs and have an auto play option when that page loads. One page where everyone goes to get info about you. Less pages, less confusion. And remove the limit to how many friends you can have. If everyone has just one page, take off the 3000 friends limitation and just let people have as many friends as they want. What’s the big deal? Why force music artists for instance to have two pages? Do Michael W. Smith or Martina McBride need to have two profiles – one private for their close family and friends and one public for their fans? (I don’t have 1000s of fans like they do so they probably need more than one page. And keeping their families and friends updated as well as their fans all on one Social website platform like Facebook would be easier than going to two different sites to update them all. And Facebook is more interactive with pictures and events than just sending out mass text e-mails a few times a year. But just having one page on Facebook instead of two would be even easier for them to update everyone.)

I don’t know how to resolve that issue other than to say, if you’re going to have a web presence, just make it all public. If you want to keep your info private, don’t put it on the web at all. Be real with people. If you’re an artist, make it part of your life. Integrate your socialization with your friends into your everyday life. After all, your music is part of your everyday life, so you might as well say so and one day post that you’re going to the movies and the next day post that you are having a concert. That is your life. Just post it that way. I don’t think you need one page for all your non-music activities and another page for your “only-music” activities… but maybe that’s just how I would do it. Maybe there are those that have other wants. Maybe there are fans of your music that don’t care you went to the dentist today and only want to know about your music… then I would say, keep your Facebook page for all of your socialization and combining all of what you are doing and point your “music-only” fans to your main web site if they want to follow only your music. Why have your own website with everything on it (with no interaction with your visitors I might add), then have a Facebook page for keeping in touch with your fans and friends and family, then another Facebook page for your music only? Then have a Myspace page on top of that with some of everything in a very awkward format that takes longer times to download and update? (You can’t even have more than like 7 of your songs on Myspace at any one time.) Too much redundancy.

Relationships with people are what life is all about and Facebook does a good job of that. (Reverb Nation and the other music sites are really only about the music side of your life. We all have more than just one thing in our lives. And people want to feel like you are being real with them and not just trying to separate them from their money by selling them your music. They want value and giving them that extra glimpse into your life – letting them know that you are a real person with real experiences and real successes and failures like they have in their lives – can give them that value.)

[...] Helloform » It’s too late for MySpace [...]

People should try http://audiofarm.org

I guess this is what happens when companies grows too big and start employing people without the proper selection process, you end up with lot of people doing lots of different things but nothing good comes out.
facebook appears to be better at growing up even though it has grown up in a smaller time.

I hate MySpace. And I don’t know anyone that uses it that doesn’t have the same feeling about it. Yet, don’t fool yourself, it will be up for a long time, because it still is the place where every band has to be. MySpace is were contacts appear, because it is “where music is”. Promoters, labels, artists, fans, everywhere is there and they are – in a technological unsatisfying way, yes – doing it using MySpace. MySpace, the platform? Garbage. MySpace, the network of people? Priceless.

When Myspace started back in 2003,everyone had to sign up. Me,my friends,family and everyone else just thought it was so freaking cool because there was never anything like it.Designing page layouts was fun. It was a great way to connect with friends and family. Getting friend requests from artist all around the country was cool. It was great way of discovering new talent. I did not like getting all the random messages from creepy weirdos across the globe or the spam in my inbox. On Facebook I have more privacy which I like. On Myspace anyone can find you because to me Myspace is like a dating site(along with being several other things) and some use it to find romance which I am not there for. I got so sick of this that I just stopped using my account and just stick to Facebook and Twitter. Sure Facebook could work on a few things,but MySpace has far greater kinks to work out.

We have moved away from myspace as we could not have get to grips with getting our look across, we found d2mondo.com which allowed us to build our bamds complete site for free, and our designer had no issues as it has standard css and javascript. So Bye Bye MySpace hello D2mondo.

[...] By doing too much, MySpace has become hard to understand. Why would I be there? I need simplicity and this just doesn’t fly. ➡ It’s too late for MySpace [...]

[...] we have MySpace. Last week I read a blog post on the demise of MySpace or It’s too late for MySpace. I hadn’t actively used any MySpace account in months if not years by now and as that author [...]

Myspace for me is now extremely frustrating. The problem is there is still a large teenage presence there, and in order to keep in touch with my friends, I have to go on there. There are so many problems with myspace that it makes me want to punch babies. But the people at Myspace don’t seem to care….Hopefully everyone will realize facebook is the better choice :]

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