When hip-hop historians look back at 2011 there’s no doubt that one of the milestones will be the release of Watch The Throne, the collaborative album between Jay-Z and Kanye West. The album not only debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart but earlier this month it was certified platinum for selling over one million copies in the United States alone.

Additionally the tour the duo have undertaken to support the disc, which kicked off last month in Atlanta, has been also heralded as one of the most exciting shows of the year. “We’re having a great time,” Hova told MTV News last week. “It’s like the best party you’ve ever been to every night. It’s star-studded and it’s music and it’s just unbelievable.”
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That’s why it should come as no surprise that due to “overwhelming demand” the duo have added a third date to the Los Angeles run of their tour on Dec 11th to precede their shows at the Staples Centeron the 12th and 13th. Oh and if you weren’t able to get your hands on tickets for the show on the 11th, don’t worry because Myspace has a pair that we are giving away.
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All you have to do to enter is leave a comment that includes your favorite Watch The Throne song. Simple, huh? We’ll start things out by posting the video for our favorite tune from the disc below. Good luck!

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Owen Van Natta has resigned from his position as an Executive Vice President of Business Operations at casual/social gaming megalith Zynga, according to a regulatory filing released Thursday. While Natta maintains his position on the company's board of directors, his involvement in the developer's daily operations has ceased.

Natta served as Facebook's Chief Revenue Officer until joining Myspace in 2009, where his tenure as CEO lasted until being scooped up by Zynga in August of 2010. Natta takes 2.1 million shares of Zynga stock with him, leaving behind 4.6 million of his original 6.8 million shares which had not fully vested to maturity. Despite delaying its IPO earlier this year, Zynga is still expected to go public before long, and depending on how that goes Natta's shares could either extend his resignation indefinitely, or amount to a whole lot of his last name.

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Owen Van Natta, formerly of Myspace and Facebook, resigns from Zynga but stays on its board
(AP) -- Owen Van Natta, the former CEO of Myspace, is stepping down from an executive role at Zynga but will stay on its board of directors. Van Natta, 41, was chief revenue officer at Facebook before he joined Myspace in 2009. He was hired at Zynga as executive vice president of business operations in August 2010.
Zynga Inc. said in a regulatory filing Thursday that he will no longer...

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Former Myspace Chief Executive Mike Jones on Wednesday launched Science Inc., a Santa Monica tech studio that aims to develop, provide guidance for and fund start-up companies. In an interview, Jones said he thought there was "an efficiency to be gained" in how emerging tech companies are created and built, and noted that Los Angeles has a less mature and established angel market, which can often hamper companies with fresh ideas.

"Access to early capital and mentorship and advice and strategic development is very much limited in L.A. compared to Silicon Valley," he said. "We felt we saw really interesting talent in L.A. that was having a hard time getting through the formative stages in the business."

Science will take an approach practiced by movie studios, conceiving and building its own companies in-house as well as helping already-established companies. It plans to shepherd entrepreneurs through product design, business strategy, marketing and business development. Jones added that unlike other tech studios, Science would work with the companies "for the entire life cycle of the business."

"We look at this as a long-term portfolio, not a term-based business," he said. Science is backed by investors including Rustic Canyon, White Star Capital, the Social+Capital Partnership and Tomorrow Ventures.

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MySpace is dead. Oh, it’s still out there, but isn’t worth your band's precious time anymore. If it wasn’t clear its downfall was coming when sold to News Corp., then it should have been clear when sold to ad network Specific Media this year. The social network, while terrible on usability and reliability, did wonders for the music industry in its heyday by giving bands a place where they could host their music for free streaming. While other sites would also host songs for streaming, being the top social network resulted in every band creating a MySpace profile and the site becoming the go-to destination to hear a band’s music.

MySpace has been losing users and mindshare for years now, with Facebook and its superior interaction model rocketing to the top of the social network pack. Still, while hinting at music services, Facebook took their time delivering any sort of music integration, keeping MySpace relevant to the music world long after it had been made irrelevant as a social networking platform. Eventually, YouTube surpassed MySpace as the primary place where users search for music (albeit much of its content consists of infringing uploads), and the writing was on the wall about MySpace's imminent demise.

Facebook Pages were enough to draw bands to Facebook to network with their fans on the largest social network in the world. Then Facebook opted not to create “Facebook Music,” but instead support music via applications that integrate with other services and a more direct integration with streaming services such as Spotify, MOG, and Earbits.

As the current #1 social media site and now as large as the entire Internet was in 2004, Facebook is a great place for social media addicts to promote their band and engage with fans and make new fans. But can Facebook be what MySpace was to bands and more?

In this article, we’ll take a look at a few applications that can be used to turn your band’s Facebook page into a destination where users can hear your music, much like MySpace was at its peak, but without the errors and crappy/bloated designs.

ReverbNation
ReverbNation is a social network focused on music (artists, labels, management, venues and fans) that has caught on fairly well, especially as MySpace began its decline. The service itself tries to do a lot of things, from hosting music streams and downloads and embeddable widgets, blogs, show listings, and an integrated store, and fan mailing list, while allowing for on-site fan interaction as well. The service has a paid plan, which adds some premium features, but is not required for most bands or to embed their Facebook app on your band’s Facebook page.

ReverbNation's Facebook app includes most of the site's functionality right in the app itself: a music player, tour dates, band bio, press quotes and more. It also shows your Facebook wall below the application so visitors can read your updates while listening to your music.

BandPage
The BandPage Facebook application by RootMusic is quite simply a music player for your Facebook page. The application can stream music from Soundcloud or videos from YouTube, the latter of which doesn’t require a YouTube channel or account, but can embed any video from the service. This reliance on other services can be seen as both an advantage and disadvantage in various scenarios.

The music player doesn’t take up as much space as the ReverbNation app, however, and the band’s Facebook Wall can be shown below it. Setting your BandPage as the default landing page for visitors gives them both the music and interaction on a single page.

Bandcamp
bandcamp itself is a must-have service for any unsigned band, as it lets them sell digital downloads as well as physical products very cost-effectively.

bandcamp just recently announced the release of their Facebook app, which essentially puts your bandcamp page right into Facebook, minus the template customization but with an option to upload a custom banner to fit Facebook’s specifications. As such, management of this app is painless.

Unlike the other apps, your wall posts are not shown below the bandcamp portion, so users can’t easily browse your wall while listening to your music. This oversight may be corrected in the future, since this is the first iteration of bandcamp’s Facebook application. But the main advantage of this app is that it allows bands to sell downloads and physical products right on their Facebook page. (Note: a Paypal account is required to accept payment on bandcamp or the Facebook app).

Which Should You Choose?
I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of ReverbNation’s Faceboook app. Much like the service itself, the Facebook app tries to display too much information, looks too busy, and takes up way too much space as a result. Showing your Facebook page’s Wall posts 2-4 screen lengths down below all this information is practically pointless. However, if your band has had good success leveraging ReverbNation as a social network and manages much of its information like shows and blog posts on there and uses the fan mailing list features, then it makes sense to use the ReverbNation Facebook app to continue funnelling fans and leads through that same service.

I’ve been using RootMusic’s BandPage on Metalunderground.com’s Facebook page for some time and I like it. The player is small enough to let the user scroll down to the Wall posts below to read while listening. The app is easy enough to set up and manage, but you may have to set up a SoundCloud account if you don’t have videos that you’d like to embed from YouTube. The feature set for the free edition is also pretty good and lets users share individual songs on their walls, embedding a player into the wall/feed post, download songs from Soundcloud, and more.

bandcamp’s Facebook app is the new kid on the block. The big advantage of this app is that it not only lets users stream your music, but it doubles as a store. Users can buy your music and products right on your Facebook page, just like they were on your bandcamp page. As previously mentioned, your wall posts are not shown below the bandcamp app, so users can’t easily browse your updates while listening to your music, which I find to be a drawback of this app. The audio player, like on the site, unfortunately omits a volume control, which is a big pet peeve of mine, and quite possibly tips the scales in favor of the BandPage player.

In the end, I’m undecided as to whether I prefer RootMusic’s BandPage over bandcamp’s app, but I would recommend them both over ReverbNation’s app, unless (as previously mentioned) you’re already having success with that service. Perhaps bands can use both a BandPage and bandcamp page - set up a BandPage as the default landing page for users to hear their music and read their updates (wall posts), and set up the bandcamp app as a separate page that acts more like an online store, and label it as such.

One thing is certain: every band should have a Facebook page (don’t set up a personal profile for your band, as there are limitations on them that are not on Facebook Pages) and allow users to hear their music right there...just like the good old days of MySpace.

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The former chief executive of Myspace has spoken for the first time about the demise of the once-dominant social network, admitting that News Corporation should have relaunched the site as "an entirely new brand".

In a comment piece for the CNN Money website, Mike Jones said that Myspace faced "a variety of organisational challenges" under parent company News Corp, but said it was ultimately held back by failures of marketing.

Jones stepped down as the chief executive of Myspace after two years in August, following its $35m acquisition by a group of investors including Justin Timberlake. Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chairman and chief executive, gave his frankest assessment yet of the Myspace debacle at the company's annual shareholder meeting in Los Angeles on Friday. He admitted making a "huge mistake" by not selling the social network for $6bn shortly after News Corp paid $580m for it in 2005.

"We then proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way and all of the people concerned with it are no longer with the company," he told shareholders. Jones said that it was a "mistake" to keep the Myspace brand after it was repositioned as a social entertainment hub in October last year.

"We found that regardless of how much we improved the product or the marketing message consumers' memories about the brand were too strong to allow them to view Myspace with fresh eyes and an open mind," he added. "We could not escape their images of animated GIFs."

Jones said that a bigger marketing budget might have changed perceptions of Myspace, which lost its position as the leading social network to Facebook shortly after News Corp's purchase and never recovered. But he also pointed out that brand campaigns at other internet giants such as Yahoo had failed.

"I don't think a large consumer campaign would have significantly changed the outcome for Myspace," he said. "In the end, I believe Myspace would have had a better chance for success if we had relaunched it as an entirely new brand."

Jones said that Myspace also struggled because, unlike Facebook, it did not have a product that enticed users to visit the site every day. He suggested that Myspace should have required users to sign up with their real-life name, as Facebook does.

The former AOL executive also suggested that cutting huge swathes of staff did not deliver the results that News Corp had wanted. He described how "even significant staff changes often do not result in the desired increase in efficiency".

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Over the last two years, I served as co-­president and then CEO of Myspace. I am often asked, "Why did you take that job?" It is a fair question. As a former startup entrepreneur, the Myspace role seemed out of character. But for me, Myspace was actually a perfect fit for the following reasons:

• I wanted to know if it could be done -- if we could revive a legacy Internet brand that had so many challenges.
• I wanted to study how a large media property works from the inside out.
• I wanted to do it in my hometown of Los Angeles.
A year ago, we executed one of the most significant relaunches of a historical Internet brand. We repositioned Myspace (NWS) as a social entertainment destination and introduced an entirely new technology platform, new products and refreshed content. However, the new Myspace didn't gain as much traction with consumers as we had hoped.

In August, after Specific Media acquired Myspace, I stepped down as CEO. Since then, I've been able to reflect upon my experience there. Although there will be many stories about Myspace left untold, I learned some important lessons that I'd like to share with fellow turnaround CEOs, anyone charged with running an Internet business -- and the passionate dreamers.

So, what happened?

While it's true that Myspace faced a variety of organizational challenges that impacted the speed at which we could transform the company, in the end, it was the fundamentals that held us back. And, many other legacy Internet businesses are grappling with the same kinds of problems. Here are some of the top lessons we learned:

1. Consumers have long brand memories.
2. Utility outlasts entertainment.
3. Perceived momentum = perceived value.
4. Change within large organizations must be centered around drastic actions.
5. Single front door = single point of failure.

Long Brand Memories. The lesson here is for legacy brands: there is often more reward for creating a new brand than investing in an existing brand. For example, Google (GOOG) launched Plus, not Buzz or Orkut. AOL (AOL) focused on Patch, not AOL Local. Yet in our case, we chose to keep the Myspace brand. This was a mistake. We found that regardless of how much we improved the product or the marketing message –– consumers' memories about the brand were too strong to allow them to view Myspace with fresh eyes and an open mind. We could not escape their images of animated GIFs.

It could be argued that with more time and more marketing dollars, we might have been able to change users' perceptions of Myspace. However, massive brand campaigns haven't worked to turn around other big Internet companies. Yahoo's (YHOO) $100 million "It's Y!ou" ad campaign is one such example. I don't think a large consumer campaign would have significantly changed the outcome for Myspace. In the end, I believe Myspace would have had a better chance for success if we had relaunched it as an entirely new brand.

Utility Outlasts Entertainment. Myspace Music has always had a strong brand affiliation with entertainment. Its popular Secret Shows franchise -- a series of free concerts with top artists exclusively for Myspace users -- helped to create an incredible bridge between online and offline experiences and established a certain brand tone in consumers' minds. With the relaunch, we sought to capture the essence of Myspace Music and expand it to other entertainment categories on the site.

However, where Myspace came up short was on utility -- that is, we didn't have a product that compelled users to come to the site every day, something that had true-long lasting utility for consumers. At its inception, Facebook required users' to register with their real names. This helped it develop a real world social graph that was a true utility for users and thus. In other words, it has long-lasting value. Whereas Myspace's entertainment value, with its optional anonymity and its entertainment -­- focused interest graph, never achieved the same level of utility for consumers.

Yahoo and Google are also a good example of this. Yahoo is a content oriented, entertainment brand with some utility via email, photos, etc. Compare that to Google, which is near-pure utility to the consumer. The lesson here is that the market and consumers are predisposed to value utility over entertainment because consumers create longer lasting relationships with utilities that make their daily lives easier.
Perceived momentum = perceived value. As of August 2010, Myspace was interacting with over 100 million users a month, generating billions of page views and streaming hundreds of millions of songs. Yet, despite these incredible metrics, the market value for Myspace was far below the value placed on many other smaller, yet similar, businesses.

The lesson here is that the market determines value based on the perception of a company's momentum, whether it's a small businesses or a large legacy enterprise. For startups, I would go a step further and say that momentum is everything. When I advise start-ups, I recommend they focus on showing either user traction or revenue traction -- but typically it is hard to do both. In fact, one of the worst places a startup can end up is having modest momentum in both areas but not being able to show clear, strong growth momentum.

Change within large organizations must be centered around drastic actions. Large companies with practices built to support large organizations are difficult to transform quickly without radical personnel changes. At Myspace, we instituted several shifts in personnel and organizational structure. We found that while each change brought greater efficiencies in decision-making and product development, they weren't radical enough to accomplish the enormous task in front of us.

Do not underestimate how deeply muscle memory is embedded in the company's processes and staff -- so much so that even significant staff changes often do not result in the desired increase in efficiency. It was only through major change, a full disruption to the system, that we were able to galvanize the organization around new goals and begin seeing increased efficiencies. Slow behavioral change creates slow process change. Large behavioral change creates a drastic process change.

Single front door = single point of failure. Many large Internet businesses, such as Myspace and Yahoo, have a single "brand" front door, in that users have one point of entry into the site. Behind the door, users will find multiple product lines. Unfortunately, a single front door means there is a single point of failure in consumers' minds -- even when the product lines behind it are robust.

After the Myspace relaunch, we were able to stabilize many of the primary metrics and start to show growth in certain areas of the product and user behavior. We were beginning to see a clear split in old vs. new user behavior. However, because we had a single front door, we couldn't easily demonstrate clearly defined momentum that was applicable across the entire site.

Netflix (NFLX) faces a similar challenge. Its legacy DVD business was weighing down the perceived momentum of the streaming business and the company overall. So Netflix tried to differentiate the two business lines and create separate websites for each. They've since reversed that decision, but it the long run, separate website may end up being the right answer.

A few parting thoughts for future turn-around investors, boards and executives:

• In the digital world, new brands are easier to create than fixing momentum issues with historically large brands.

• A huge single site / single front door is wonderful when it works, but hedge your strategy with offsite revenue, and if applicable, multiple points of customer entry.

• There are no bad people, only bad processes. To fix them, create radical cultural change, don't attempt a slow cultural shift.

The Internet is still an adolescent industry. The ability to show new life in more mature businesses is crucial to long-term success. This is a problem we all must embrace and solve for. And when we do, I believe we will find that building new businesses on top of older businesses of scale is the best formula to rapid growth and audience renewal.

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It’s easy to write off MySpace, it being shit and all, and it’s true that the flagging social network style service is still haemorrhaging users, with unique visitors down 7% over the summer. That said, according to ComScore, it still has 30.5million unique visitors monthly in the US making it the 35th biggest website in America. A long way off Facebook, which sits at number four in the websites chart behind the search engine and webmail providers, but only 1.8 million users behind Twitter. Which is possibly why new owners Specific Media, the ad agency which plans to relaunch MySpace as a music destination site next year, remain optimistic.

Meanwhile Rupert Murdoch, while fighting off critics at a rather tricky AGM of News Corp shareholders on Friday, was more candid about his company’s handling of MySpace than most of the media conglom’s other perceived failings (News Of The World phone hacking aside, of course). According to The Guardian, he said News Corp was right to pay $580 million for MySpace in 2005 (they sold it for about $35 million earlier this year), but admitted that his people had then mismanaged the asset at every turn. Murdoch: “We then proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way and all the people involved with it are no longer with the company”. Ouch.

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News Corp's purchase of Myspace was a "huge mistake" and the social network was mismanaged "in every possible way" following the acquisition, chief executive Rupert Murdoch said Friday. Murdoch, addressing shareholders at the media and entertainment company's annual meeting in Los Angeles, said News Corp.'s 2005 purchase of Myspace for $580 million was seen as "fantastic" at the time. "We paid $600 million," Murdoch said. "We could have sold it for $6 billion a month later."Myspace, however, was quickly eclipsed by Facebook, which has grown to more than 800 million members as Myspace's numbers have dwindled.

"I made a huge mistake," Murdoch said of the Myspace acquisition. "We then proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way," he said, adding that "all of the people concerned with it are no longer with the company."News Corp. sold Myspace in June for $35 million, just six percent of its purchase price, to Specific Media, a digital ad-targeting platform. Murdoch also defended News Corp. during the meeting from criticisms by shareholders angry about a phone-hacking scandal in Britain that led to the closure of the tabloid weekly The News of the World.

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Every day I click the link to click the box to BLOCK these comments from happening, and every damn day they show up again. If there is anyone in the MySpace help room who can help me get this blocked, I’d love to hear from you.

FOR THE REST OF YOU: I WILL BEGIN DELETING YOUR ACCOUNTS FROM MINE IF YOU CONTINUE TO SEND THESE TO ME. MY TIME IS VALUABLE AND I’M GETTING WAY TO MANY OF THESE MESSAGES. A few hours later, the Blue Collar comedian posted a “thank you” to MySpace members for resolving the issue.

Since my previous bulletin, several thousand of you have stepped up to try and help. I think I may have finally figured out how to block the Apps. On the Apps page (to which there is a link at the top of your MySpace page), there is a box to click to remove the check mark allowing these as comments…. I had done this several times, but it kept checking itself back for some reason. I learned that if you go INTO the app that’s hounding you, there’s a link under ADD THIS APP. Don’t add the app, click the link that says “report this app” and inside that screen is where you find the thing to click “block this app”. For the three of you out of nearly 70,000 that I pissed off, I’m really not that sorry. If you didn’t already know I’m an asshole, you weren’t paying that close attention anyway. I was just trying to make a point.

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