I came across this article while working on my paper and thought I would share - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/can_music_save_myspace.php
The gist of this article is that Myspace has recently decided that they would give up on trying to be a major social network and instead focus on music. Definitely an interesting development, as even though music was a huge factor in the site's creation and popularity, Myspace caught on because of its social networking. However, after losing so much traffic to Facebook the site has shifted its strategy entirely. Now they are partnered with the major record labels in order to provide streaming versions of the labels' entire catalogs. Whether or not this will work out in the long run for the site remains to be seen. But just to show you how much traffic the site has lost to Facebook, Myspace is now ranked as the 17th most trafficked site according to Alexa, whereas Facebook is now second only to Google. When New New Media was published, Myspace was 7 and Facebook was 5 (109).
Finding out that Myspace had even shifted to a music-first site, let alone the fact that they created this new partnership with the major labels, was completely news to me. They have an interesting strategy now, but if people aren't aware of it, how successful can they be?
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I am sure this is where radio station advertisting will step in to take care of this one. I listen to 101.9 RXP a lot in my car, and they constantly play new music and I like a lot of what I hear but always forget the name of the band because it's there for a second, then gone.
ReplyDeleteWhat I would love to see Myspace do is team up with radio stations, and help promote new artists on the radio and link a Myspace page to the radio website, or vice versus. I could go onto the radio website, then be directed to the Myspace page and see all the new artists they played during a given day, or radio show. Then, they would have streams of the songs played so I could click through, hear even more new music (while using Myspace) and hopefully find the band I happened to hear last week and loved. Now not only does the radio station get traffic, but so does Myspace and eventually the band.
In a perfect world, this would work every time for me!
Great point and article, Mike, and excellent idea, Jessica. I would also add that MySpace blogging offers a unique combination of social networking and blogs, and that is a vastly untapped potential.
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