Social Media

MySpace Begs Users To Come Back

image from i725.photobucket.com Earlier this week MySpace sent an email to lapsed which offers a hint of how desperately they're fighing for survival. The letter came on top of an earnings report from parent News Corp that showed recent MySpace layoffs cost $107 million in severance and restructing. News Copr also took a $168 million writedown, based mostly o the MySpace's falling valuation. To  help turn the tide, MySpace sent this email begging users to give them another try:

"We've missed you at Myspace lately. Plain and simple, we think you should come back. And here's why.

"The new Myspace provides the best social entertainment experience on Earth.

"You can now follow your favorite topics in music, movies, celebs, and TV and get instant updates from around the web.

 "The new Myspace gives you custom recommendations so you can discover more of what you love and connect with new like-minded friends."

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18 Comments

  1. Im actually quite surprised to see this. I understand they are struggling in a bad way, but this just stinks of desperation. Furthermore, they offer no real explanation as to what makes them unique over any other social media source on the net.

  2. Don’t know who drafted that note, but it doesn’t sound like it’s written by anyone who is either aware of trends in social media or is passionate about their job. Who do they think will be swayed by this shallow marketing speak?
    Want people to come back Myspace? INNOVATE. Offer people something they didn’t even know they wanted, not the same things Facebook does, but in a much clunkier interface.
    Myspace is a bad fucking neighborhood that never gentrified.

  3. The MySpace experience
    – messy interface
    – clunky player
    – computer crashes
    – staring at Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Jonas Brothers
    – Crash, clunk, pop-up, paaaage loaaaaaaaaaading and back to Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, The Jonas Brothers
    – hi-jacked clunky player rap hip-hop CRASH
    I thought I had 8 gigs of ram – Yikes!

  4. I have to admit that I use MySpace all the time, I just don’t login. I do love the fact that I can listen to a full length release from almost any artist, I think that fact needs to be marketed more.

  5. Maybe if News Corp starts getting Glen Beck and Hannity to start pushing it with stories about the Socialist Liberals trying to destroy MySpace, they can get enough of their sheep to follow. BTW I heard about this story on FaceBook.

  6. Myspace doesn’t offer any chance for so called one’s favourite music. There are 3 types of music only – hiphop, rap and pop which get promoted on Myspace. Their charts are very limited so there’s no chance for heavy music to exist and it is not any network for people who do not listen to popular music. It’s not that there are not metal, industrial, rock or other bands for subcultures. The thing is Myspace ignores them and their listeners. If Myspace changes its attitude then it may be a reason for return.
    Hint – if Myspace is for sale then they want to rise their value (by having more people=numbers) and get sold for more. Data is what matters in business.

  7. MySpace needs to innovate. Once they accomplish that I can see them getting back into the swing. However, Facebook has a lot more apps for music. Companies like iLike (that allows users to find music) and WaTunes (a new service that allows users to download & share music) makes it difficult for MySpace to compete.

  8. Their plea sounds like it was written by someone who doesn’t even have a MySpace account. As someone else has said, there’s just no USP mentioned and that’s possibly because right now, MySpace doesn’t have one.
    I’ve had a profile on their for years, but the site just hasn’t evolved enough and is riddled with spammers – and that just makes it a chore to use.

  9. This seems like such a strange approach. As someone else said, this reeks of desperation. I’m surprised there wasn’t an additional “pretty please with sugar on top” added in there.

  10. When they’re new ‘redesign’ rendered our several hundred dollar custom page design useless (it no longer works) we pretty much gave up on them. I’m sure other artists shared the same fate – and the new ‘redesign’ isn’t any better. We’re not going to pay another couple hundred dollars to customize the page again, that’s for sure.

  11. Myspace is simply f**ed: In the last months they made the user pages HEAVIER, changed them to a *less* customizable (or better – standardized) layout, added a big and (very) annoying Advertising, and offered really NO innovation.
    And the silliest thing of all, users can now see IF and WHEN their messages have been readen. Privacy-oriented is this last feature worst than Facebook itself.
    So, there are a few alternatives to avoid ALL of this “features” at once: Facebook, Soundcloud, Twitter, Last.fm and/or finally an own domain. The users HAVE other and better choices to be known.
    Myspace is starving? Own fault.

  12. All those poor folks are gonna miss their “Mobster” and “Mafia” accounts. Lol. The email smacked of desperation and a guess at what they think were missing. But myspace still reminds me of complex coding for designing and an even more complex page layout. Give me the simplicity of no layout and 140 characters a tweet. Sorry Myspace your days are numbered.

  13. I agree. There has to be a simpler alternative. The thing is no one has taken the best of entertainment social networking (Songkick, LiveMagazine.com, etc.) and combined all the resources into one site. With the money behind MySpace they could have done this long ago.

  14. Myspace ruining the work I had put in the design of my band’s page by arbitrarily switching to v2 is reason enough not to deal with them anymore

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