Everyone's favorite social media site from the mid 2000's is about to make a comeback. At least that's what I'm hearing. When I first heard about it, I thought it was just a meme or something honestly because MySpace had one of the most meteoric falloffs in the history of websites. When it was popping, it was awesome though. I really only have good memories of it. I think I made my page back around 2006 or 2007. It had already been out since 2003 but I really didn't hear about it until I was looking for ways to get my music out into the world. By the time I got on it, they had this thing where you could be a 'musician' account and they'd let you put a music player with your songs on your page. So I signed up and had a lot of fun with it. But then... something happened...

There was a lot that was fun about MySpace. But I can really only speak from an artist and music fan's perspective. For me, it wasn't so much about finding 'friends' as it was about finding people who could enjoy the music I make, and finding other artists that inspired me. That's how I found out about MIA, MGMT, The Cool Kids, Chromeo, Steed Lord... man! So many!!!! (I gotta do another post about all of em at some point). Anyway, I remember when I first posted a couple of songs I had worked on. I worked REALLY hard on those songs and felt like... "yeah man, I'm gonna kill 'em with this these." So I posted, and I'm not gonna lie... I used to kinda spam people's page, cause you could do this thing where you go write some comments on other people's pages. So, I would go around and write something like... "I'm this new artist and my music is so new and innovative, whooptie woo..." Obviously, I can't remember exactly what I said, but it was something like that. So this one dude went to my profile and listed to my music and just... ripped me a new one. Very scathing review. He basically said I was doing nothing new and was actually pretty mediocre. Not gonna lie, it hurt!!! LMAOOOOO! But! That dude helped me so much cause it was a reality check. After that, I was like... "You know what? If I'm gonna be talking big shit about doing stuff differently and all that, I gotta really be doing it." So I deleted those songs from my page and got to work on some new ones. I can't remember what the first ones I uploaded after that were, but they actually started to get some plays. And I just kept going. That helped me realize that the hard part isn't making songs, it's making GOOD songs.

Another one of the seemingly thousands of features MySpace had back then was the ability for 'regular people' profiles (they'll always be special to me) to put music players on their pages. I can't rememeber if they could only do one song or could add a playlist. But the song would just start playing as soon as you load up their page. What was the ultimate compliment as an Artist was going to some person's profile who you don't know, and your song just starts playing!!! Great memories. I never really made any money from digital music back then cause streaming didn't really exist, but at one point they put this thing on there called 'Snowcap' or something like that. I made a couple of dollars from it but nothing serious. I was able to create a lil T-shirt brand with my cousin and sell quite a few shirts primarily from MySpace though. And I did sell some physical copies of my CD on my college campus in Japan but that's another story for another post!

So! Where did MySpace go wrong? In my opinion, there were a lot of things that contributed to their downfall, but I'll list out the main ones I can think of.

• 1. They added a few too many features and the UI too busy
• 2. Facebook and Twitter came out and were cooler (at the time)
• 3. They didn't evolve properly, just kept adding features
• 4. They tried an ambitous redesign, but it was bad
• 5. They 'accidentally' deleted everyone's data

Ok, let's go down the list!

Too many features.

On the surface, having lots of features seems like a good thing. But I think MySpace was just a victim of things going out of style. Back then, maximalism was kinda the main design trend. We were kinda in the 'Swag' era, so having bright colors and just a lot going on visually was seen as cool. Like seriously, on MySpace, you could use HTML and CSS to decorate your page literally however you liked, add music that just started playing immediately, have a blog, post bulletins (I still don't really understand how these were different than blogs), post on forums, have a photo gallery, send messages, send INSTANT messages, post status updates... It was a lot. Then Twitter came out, and it was like... 'Super clean, and JUST a status update.' I don't think you could even post images on Twitter when it was first out. That came a while later. And Facebook had more features compared to Twitter, but it was still clean and minimalist compared to MySpace.

Facebook and Twitter

Ok, so like I mentioned above, these two came out and people started moving toward them. MySpace started to have this connotation of being for kinda immature people. Like High-schoolers and young college kids basically. But Facebook, which had been out for a while, really established itself as being like this 'Sophisticated University Club.' Now, of course it's nothing like that now, but that's kinda how it started out. At first, all your highschool friends who didn't go to college, younger siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, etc. Just couldn't see it so it had a coolness about it because of that. So although MySpace was fun, it started to feel kinda mehh because 'anybody' could get on it. Personally, I didn't feel like that because I loved it for artistic discovery. I found so many other cool artists who I was inspired by that I would have never found on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter eventually became more of a 'media' platform but like I said at the time, it was just status updates. So some famous person would just post some shit like 'On the way to Luxembourge' and people would go crazy. But it wasn't good for discovering new stuff. You'd still have to click a link and go outside the platform, and of course, the apps never want you to leave their platform, so that always felt clunky.

Failed to Evolve

So like I said, the times were a changin. And MySpace just couldn't keep up. One big shift in social networking sites at the time was the change from having 'friends' to having 'followers'. I mean, it kinda made sense from a data science perspective because you have more information to determine who's most important in a social graph when you know the direction of the connection. But from the perspective of actually being social, it was terrible. Because people quickly realized this and stopped focusing on finding other people to connect with and started foccusing on attracting people to be 'fans' of them. It's not MySpace's fault that this became the trend, but they tried to adopt it in a way that didn't really work. I definitely wanna give them credit for trying though because it was a little different in theory to just having 'followers'. They made it so that you could 'connect' to to people... or their media, then people could also 'connect' to you. Whenever there was was a one-way connection like that, you'd see this one-sided Venn diagram kinda icon showing that. If you both were connected to eachother, it would show this full-circle icon symbolic of that. But now let's get into what really sealed their fate...

The Re-design Just Didn't Work

Aside from the 'connection' thing which honestly, wasn't bad, they tried a new spin on another new design trend. Infinite scroll. While Twitter and Facebook had a vertical scroll, MySpace was like... what if we went.. horizontal? Idk, it just never felt right. You start on someone's page and you just scroll to the right and start seeing all this 'activity' that they've been doing. It just always felt clunky, and on mobile, which I forgot to mention earlier but was taking over desktop on EVERYTHING at the time, you'd still have to scroll vertically anyway. It was a valiant effort to try something new, but they also had to take out the HTML and CSS profile customization to make that possible. And that was literally like the coolest part about the platform.

They Deleted All Our Content!!!

So at some point, I think they were doing a server migration or something like that and they just deleted a bunch of people's shit. Now, they say it was an accident, but idk... I guess we'll never know. But you probably don't realize how many people were using MySpace as kind of a repository for their online memories, or a portfolio of their work. And most of us were young at the time, so we weren't really thinking about backing up files and all that. So yeah, they deleted a lot of music, pictures, videos, etc. It was a lot. So on top of the fact that they had already lost a bunch of their users to Facebook and Twitter, and had a clunky user experience, they now had a site with a metric shit tonne of broken images and non-playing audio, so the whole site just felt extremely broken. And it's still like that to this day. You should go play around with it to see what I'm talking about! Do it before they fix it and put up the new version lol.

Comeback Season

So, as you can see, it's still very much still around. Just hangin in there. Now the original creators, Chris and Tim Vanderhook, are saying that they're gonna re-launch it. I have so many questions though. Like, is it gonna keep the same name and url? Are they going to try and fix the current design, or go back to something that's fully HTML customizable like the old one was? Or do something completely new and different? Who's the target market for it gonna be now? People who were on it back then, or today's youth? Will it use recommendation algorithms to try and push 'viral' content, or just let things become naturally popular like before? Honeslty, I think it has a good shot at succeeding if it goes back to being focused on exploration of Creatives instead of Influencers. That was always what made it fun and different from everything else. Nothing against Influencers, but they have their platforms. I still enjoy discovering new artists, but now it's such a painful experience wading through all the other random shit that's out there, then still be shown all the distractions even after following the artist.

Personally, I feel like Creators should always have their own websites, that's why this post is sponsored by HTM-fucking-L. Yeah, I don't really believe in waiting on a platform to 'allow' you to publish anything to the internet. But hey, I'll be real, it's nice to have places to congregate and discover new stuff.

If you made it this far, I really appreciate you reading all the way through. And if you're interested, here's my MySpace page: Pyramid Skeme on MySpace.