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MySpace CEO VanNatta At MIDEM

Follow all the action #MIDEM.

This afternoon's MidemNet conversation is with MySpace CEO Owen VanNatta. The highlights:

  • image from www.iochatto.comMySpace is following the lead of Sonicbids and ReverbNation and linking with SoundExcange. They have already identified 25,000 artists that are owed $15 million 
  • Site has 180,000 playlists
  • 7% page view growth
  • 92% growth in unique users year over year
  • 30% growth just this past month
  • MySpace Music just launched in Australia and New Zealand
  • Now the #1 music site in Australia
  • Recently launched in UK and users are responding well
  • On the iLike purchase:  MySpace acquired great talent and the largest music app across other social networks. MySpace want to do more of that.
  • On imeem, VanNatta saying they picked the pieces after the company shut down primarily to take try to migrate their users.

Bruce Houghton on 01/23/2010 in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (7)
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7 Comments

  1. I know MySpace is in transition mode, but there’s not much substance in those statistics: “Recently launched in UK and users are responding well” – so are our users…
    Also, how do the imeem playlists factor into that 180,000 figure?

  2. @Adam
    So true … numbers can be manipulated, so questioning the imeem takeover is a valid point.
    Just to give another example — real life statistic from the Charts of ReverbNation …. one band has the following:
    Fans: 180569
    Wow, that’s an amazing number of fans …. or is it? When you consider the other significant stat from the band:
    Rct Plays: 16
    Not very active is it, considering the number of “fans?”
    Point being if you only focus on one of these stats, the picture can appear different.
    Don’t doubt that My Space know which numbers to hype and which ones not to.

  3. @Stephen,
    You do not have a clear understanding of how Reverb operates. Its a bit different than other sites (possibly innovative, but obviously confusing, based on your comments). I myself had several questions for them about it recently.
    Essentially, Reverb tracks fans from an Artist’s MySpace and Facebook pages and mailing lists, in addition to on Reverb. But if Artists don’t deploy the Reverb music player widgets or apps to those same pages, they cannot record the plays that are happening across the other sites – I was told that the APIs from those other sites provide fan counts, but not play counts.
    In other words, they are trying to sort of ‘average’ the fans from other sources, in addition to their own site (which is not really designed for fans). From this average, they make their charts.
    I’ll leave it to others much smarter than me to determine if measuring all of the fans from other social nets is a good thing, or if it just exposes them to the type of fake fan fraud that has been so prevalent on sites like MySpace for so long. I suppose its not all that dissimilar to what Band Metrics or The Next Big Sound are trying to do – measuring from multiple sites into one place.

  4. @Peter
    I DO have a clear understanding of how ReverbNation works. Two scientists can see the same statistics and interpret them differently. Statistics are just that — statistics. This is what the post is about – statistics from My Space. We’re questioning the context in which those statistics are derived.
    Clearly the ReverbNation tools are designed for use on other sites. Obviously, there will be duplication of “fans” rendering a skewed view of the total “fan” statistics. i.e the same fan can, as you stated, come from RN, My Band, My Space, etc. tripling the count.
    The only statistic that matters is whether or not a band can make a living.

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