In its second major re-launch in a year and firmly under new management, Myspace is targeting the indie sector as part of a back-to-basics repositioning.
It was sold to Specific Media in June for $35 million [A$37m] by News Corp. – which had originally acquired it in 2005 for $580 million [A$616m]. At the time, there was much talk of a culture clash between the old Myspace guard and the new News Corp. management structure. Indeed, founders Chris de Wolfe and Tom Anderson left the company in 2009 and it struggled to hold onto senior executives, with a series of high profile departures in the first half of 2010 – including Owen Van Natta and Jason Hirschhorn as well as the exit of Courtney Holt this February.
News Corp.’s all-or-nothing reboot of the site – and, remember, one its senior executives, including Rupert Murdoch, would openly lambast in earnings calls – was to focus on social media discovery in October 2010.
It became apparent that News Corp. was not prepared to go the distance and within a matter of months had signalled its intention to sell it, cutting staff in January and closing a number of international offices, including its Sydney operation in May.
Its new CEO Tim Vanderhook told Billboard the full and formal re-launch will happen at the start of next year and it is currently putting various elements in place. He said it has deals with labels and other copyright owners that trump anything Facebook and its affiliate partners can muster – and it is this point it must focus its rebuilding efforts on.
"Nobody has the relationships we have with the four major labels, the catalogue of 25,000 independent artists and 42 million songs,” he said. “If you take Facebook's music announcements with Rdio, MOG and Spotify and you aggregated all those services up and took their audio catalogue, it's not even half of what MySpace has."
He argues the company lost focus of its indie roots (and market differentiation around this) while under the ownership of News Corp. and that now is the time to use this in its reinvention.
"It used to be that when you think of Myspace, you'd think of the independent, unsigned artists who went and created their image and used it as a marketing platform to promote their music and try to build a fanbase," he stated. "Overall, MySpace got away from that under News Corp.'s leadership and lost sight of that independent artist, which is something we have a strong hold on.”
AllThingsDigital published details from leaked presentation (entitled ‘Myspace: The Next Chapter’) the company had prepared for various marketing partners puts more meat on the bones and hints at what 2012 will bring. In it, Specific says it wants Myspace to become "the #1 online community music destination” and its goal is “to feed the energy of youth culture everywhere”. It also said it wanted to become “the Hulu of music” and have content from all four majors and thousands on indies sitting cheek by jowl.
The presentation boasts of the site having “the largest audio and video catalogue in the world” and how Specific Media and Myspace together are “collectively stronger”. It also ran a comparatively table showing how Myspace has more elements and greater functionality than other digital platforms including Vevo, Pandora, Last.fm, Ping and Spotify.
The timing, however, for Myspace 3.0 could not be worse. Firstly it comes as Specific cuts back on its own staff, reducing its workforce by 8%. Plus its new direction was unboxed less than a fortnight after Facebook went all gun blazing into the social music space through a flurry of partnerships including Spotify, Vevo, SoundCloud and Rdio as it approaches 800 million users globally.
Part of Myspace’s problem – and why it has been listing so badly – was down to a protracted identity crisis. News Corp. bought it at the peak of its market worth and then struggled with what to do with it. This was only exacerbated by the rapid appointment and departure of senior executives, meaning it lost direction and never recovered.
It is admirable of Specific to invest in the site and take it back to its roots. The concern is that the market has moved on so much since it first appeared that it might be able to go back to the drawing board but may never move forward again from there.