MySpace quivers under News Corp axe MySpace is continuing to limp along on the interwebs and the once hugely popular social network even gave itself a makeover last week. But News Corp, which owns the firm, could pull the plug on the entire operation within the year. As reported by another News Corp tentacle – All Things Digital – yesterday, Rupert Murdoch’s …
Their sync app.
This allows a degree of synchronization with facebook.
If they implemented this properly and and for other networks too, they could become a useful hub.
I.E. you use your preferred network synced to myspace and if a friend has a different preferred network also synced to myspace, you can interact.
I am not some spotty 14 year old nearly up to the big 4-0, but I enjoy niche heavy metal music and MySpace is a great place to go to find bands, who otherwise may not have a ready made portal from which to advertise themselves and their current activities.
On MySpace, you often get to hear entire songs not just 30 sec samples that Amazon or iTunes allow, not that either of those places would dare carry great unsigned bands who spend years trudging the club circuit to earn their chops!
Yes, there is a lot of dross on MySpace, but where there's muck there's brass!
( Mines the leather jacket with the Here Lies Affliction and Trigger the Bloodshed CDs in the pockets! )
Need to exploit their relevance to the live music scene.
And they have, to some extent, but evidently not enough if they're pissing away millions on ??? and aren't getting any popular as a result.
Sod all the muck and dross that appears all over MySpace. Just make it the Google of pub bands and amateur MCs.
Let's have a look at the nav bar on their homepage and try to work out what they're doing wrong shall we?
"Find Friends" - No one cares.
"Music" - Why is the whole site not "Music"?
"Video" - No one cares.
"Movies" - How is that different to Video? Again, no one cares.
"Games" - No one cares.
"Events" - Why is this hidden away, why aren't there any events on the homepage?
"More" - No one will ever click a nondescript "more" button, ever.
I see featured bands on the homepage with no indication of what genre they are. What's to stop me from assuming that they are complete shit? Other than a "Listen" button that I won't click? Lay it out like a music store and people will visit your site. Lay it out like a shitfest and no one will care.
Come on guys this is amateur grade stuff. How did you manage to fuck the site up this badly?
Tinyfish "relaunched" our MySpace page to go with our new album. Myspace is, alas, still counterintuitive to use, still crashes (regardless of which browser you use) and still doesn't let you be as flexible as you need.
The sad munging of any link you create so that it goes through their advert filter, the useless headings, the temperamental music loader/player...
I wouldn't care if it vanished tomorrow.
So bands have profiles, venues have profiles. Anyone not directly involved with the music has a minimal profile, but it links closely to Facebook so they can have friends to lol around with. Also needs to link with Youtube. Could also provide a gig calendar bands can embed in their own websites. Makes money by advertising venues, signed bands, gigs, downloads, T-shirts.
News corp is unlikely to be able to work this out for themselves, sadly.
...MySpace has largely become a portal for discovering new music. In this regard, with their customisable pages, music player and other bits and peices, they are actually far more suited for pushing new music than Facebook. Why they aren't taking advantage of this is a complete and utter mystery. It may not be what they were, or what they wanted to be but surely its better to adapt and play to their strengths than stubbornly pretending they are a relevant "general" social network anymore?
In fact, I've just checked my old MySpace account and the ONLY activity on there IS by musicians/DJs. Its time for MySpace to start exploring their new direction (whether it was chosen by them or not), if they don't its time for their employees to start looking for alternative work!
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