The Myspace Effect: Rebuilding a Digital Empire

In 2011, during my senior year of high school, one of our typical weekly sleepovers took an unexpected turn when my best friend Devirn launched into one of her legendary rants. Her target? Her lament of the rising popularity of Facebook. In her eyes,Myspace was the greatest platform ever and one day, we are all going to wish we hadn’t given up on it so easily. Fast forward to today, and her rant has aged like fine wine.

When I started writing this, Devirn was the first person I thought of. I called her up, and as soon as I mentioned it, she burst out laughing, triumphantly declaring, “SEE! I WAS RIGHT, AND YOU KNOW IT! CODING, CULTURE, COMMUNITY! WE HAD IT ALL!”

Both of us ended up in social media careers, so we shared a nostalgic laugh and reminisced about our youth. The Myspace Era truly was something special. We really did have it all. Myspace was a universe of its own, where every profile was a unique reflection of its owner. With just a click, you could learn about a person’s music taste, style, closest friends, and current life events. It was where we discovered the best parties, kept up with friends’ relationships, and supported our favorite underground artists.

Millennials often feel a deep nostalgia for Myspace, and it’s not hard to see why. Despite embracing newer platforms, many of us believe that social media has lost some of its ethical, moral, and mental integrity along the way. 

Once a titan in the social media landscape, Myspace is now a shell of its former glory. Its landing page is flooded with slow-loading advertisements, and the interface feels outdated and busy. Sadly, many of the original profiles have vanished, lost forever in the depths of cyberspace. It’s crazy to think that this platform was once the pinnacle of social media for an extended period. Today, Myspace primarily targets artists, activists, writers, and similar creatives, indicating a shift in its focus. However, to regain relevance, Myspace could greatly benefit from a substantial upgrade to its platform.

In recent years, discussions about Myspace have been buzzing among millennials on Reddit, Quora, blogs, and various social media platforms. Many have expressed a longing for the platform’s return. Yet, after more than a decade in obscurity, can Myspace truly make a comeback in coming years? I believe so, and here’s why:

The Myspace Culture

Before there were followers, and subscribers, there were friends. All connections were mutual and everyone started out with at least one friend: Tom.If you were around during Myspace’s heyday, you’d remember Tom, a quirky white tech-savvy twenty-something with messy brown hair, an old t-shirt, and a welcoming smile that seemed to say, “I’m so glad you’re here.”

As the co-founder and initial president of Myspace, Tom Anderson played a pivotal role in keeping the network cohesive. Myspace had a setting that made your profile visible to others within your network. Since having a friend in common automatically placed someone in your network, the strategy of keeping profiles public helped bind the community together, making him the glue of the network.

A huge aspect of Myspace’s culture was its sense of community. Myspace wasn’t just a website; it was a vibrant community where connections ran deep. It was a place where you could find people who shared your passions, whether it was music, art, or simply navigating the ups and downs of life.

One of the first things you’d do after setting up your profile was curate your “Top 8” friends. It may seem a bit odd now, ranking your friends in order of importance, but back then, it was immensely popular and served as a cultural hallmark, signaling one’s closest connections.

The platform’s standout feature was its extensive customization options, which allowed users to adorn their profiles with hot pink glitter graphics, unique fonts, and custom cursors, or even personalize a music player with their favorite tunes. This level of personalization was unprecedented, giving users the ability to style their profile pages using HTML and CSS, which inadvertently introduced a generation to coding at varying levels. 

I’ll never forget how my sister would spend hours coding her profile from scratch, determined to make it stand out from the crowd. For others, like me, it was about finding that perfect layout that captured our personality and style. Each profile was like a piece of art, reflecting who we were and what we loved.

A Platform for Artists

Music played a huge role in Myspace’s culture. It was the go-to platform for discovering new music and supporting underground artists. Bands and musicians could create profiles, upload their music, and connect with fans directly. Myspace gave rise to many independent artists who found success through the platform’s community. Whether it was Calvin Harris, Sean Kingston, or Soulja Boy Tell Em, Myspace broke many artists in its heyday.

Myspace provided artists with a powerful platform to promote their events and releases, share exclusive behind-the-scenes content, and showcase live performances to a wider audience. The emergence of YouTube in 2005 further expanded these possibilities. Musicians could now create music videos, craft marketing strategies, and send music directly to their audience without the need for a major record label. Myspace’s empowerment of artists to control their product and distribution revolutionized the music industry, reshaping how both artists and consumers perceive and engage with music in the digital age.

The current landscape of music promotion reflects a clear evolution from the Myspace era. Platforms like TikTok, known for their viral dance challenges and music trends, are reminiscent of the promotional styles of the 2000s and 2010s. . Whether it was Snap Music, the  “Crank Dat” era, Jersey Club Mixes or New Orleans bounce, early social media heavily utilized user generated content to promote their music. 

Today, artists look directly to TikTok and other similar platforms to expand their reach and engage with a younger audience. With record labels vying to create the next big viral dance trend, social media has become deeply integrated into the music industry’s promotional strategies.

This shift however, hasn’t come without controversy. Recently, Universal Music Group (UMG), one of the major players in the music industry, has had its share of disputes with TikTok over licensing and royalties. This dispute escalated to the point where TikTok removed UMG’s entire catalog from its platform.

The controversy has ignited discussions about fair compensation for artists, particularly independent ones, and has brought attention to issues surrounding licensing rights, music contracts, and the relevance of record labels in today’s music industry. As creatives now have access to the same distribution and marketing channels as labels, the question arises: Is signing a record deal still beneficial? This question is especially important considering the potential risk of aligning your brand with a record label, which could lead to your music being shadow banned on these platforms.

With its current focus on artists, Myspace has the potential to explore new revenue streams by positioning itself as a thought leader in the industry. Myspace was instrumental in transforming the music landscape, prompting us to reconsider the artist’s, label’s, and consumer’s perspectives, as well as the way we all consume media as a whole.

A reimagined modern Myspace could feature dedicated pages for each artist, showcasing their latest music releases, photoshoots, music videos, behind-the-scenes content, and interviews. This modern-day Myspace would offer users a captivating experience where they could immerse themselves for hours without the complexities of contracts and licensing, allowing artists to just be artists.

Myspace ReImagined

By blending the nostalgia of the old Myspace with new, innovative features, such as a reimagined news feed and integrated tools, Myspace could once again become a vibrant hub for creativity and self-expression. This revitalized platform could draw upon its rich history while embracing the latest trends and technologies, positioning itself as a unique and indispensable platform in today’s digital landscape.

In theory, many critics of the platform have sighted Myspace’s failure to innovate, as well as company leadership’s lack of understanding the cultural importance of the platform. These factors highlight the company’s inability to reposition the brand as a front-runner in social media. 

Originally, MySpace’s brand was everything current social media platforms are not. It was authentic, interpersonal, and independent. The platform was simply put, just fun. It in a lot of ways represents the early internet. You could just explore freely. No complicated algorithms promoting divisive content. No ads distracting you from content. No influencers promoting an unrealistic lifestyle. No infinite news feed of endless content from people you don’t even know. 

In recent years there have been numerous documentaries, articles, studies, and congressional hearings about the negative effects of social media on every demographic and society at large. Most of which exclude Myspace. Myspace existed before all of these new problems. Despite various failures by the company, (privacy, security, regulation, etc) ethics is an area Myspace hasn’t received much criticism for. 

The new social media landscape however is constantly criticized for various reasons. Whether it’s misinformation, extensive data collection, addictive features, aggressive algorithms, incentivizing bad behavior, poor compensation for creators, filters, or a myriad of other issues, modern social media platforms as a whole have been heavily criticized. Many users choosing to opt out of certain platforms or social media altogether. 

By owning up to past failures, incentivizing influencers on other platforms to make content for Myspace, and promoting the brand’s ethical, authentic, and unique experience Myspace has the opportunity to do what no social media brand has been able to achieve. A comeback. 

Myspace was the first to do social media really well. It is in part the reason we have influencers, viral dance trends, and  content creators. All other platforms were influenced in some way by the way the platform was used. Despite low usership on the platform, Myspace is still adored as a brand today inspiring articles and Youtube videos praising it as the unique, revolutionary, and innovative platform that it was. Many look to it as a haven for what social media could’ve been had we not given up on it so easily.