Justin Timberlake has been talking about his decision to get his own social network, saying music has an exciting future on the internet.
It is a case of life imitating art as the co-star of The Social Network - the Oscar-winning film about Facebook - buys into Myspace. Timberlake, along with the advertising agency Specific Media, wants to revitalise the brand, and he told Sky News he was looking forward to the challenge. "It's an exciting place for the future of music. Although it seemed like such a taboo thing the internet and music - I don't think it's taboo at all.
"You make music because you want a lot of people to hear it and the fact that that could happen at a quicker pace is very, very exciting."Music also dominates other social networking sites. On Twitter, artists send around 200 million tweets per day. Lady Gaga tops the list with 13 million followers, even beating President Barack Obama. But Beyonce broke all records on the site. Some 8,868 tweets per second were sent when she announced she was pregnant at the MTV VMAs.
Jeremy Silver, the chairman of Semetric, which analyses data for the entertainment industry, told Sky News artists are using social media as a real tool in promoting themselves. "They're learning how to use it most effectively and that means in terms of how they communicate out, but also how they read what information is coming back. "There's a saying at the moment in the music industry that data is the new oil."