Myspace Music

» see music.myspace.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

myspace music's peak years overlap with my own university and graduate-school window, but myspace itself was never the dominant turkish platform. msn messenger held the entire turkish social-internet layer from about 2002 through 2010, and the social-network slot in turkey went to hi5 rather than to myspace from around 2005 through 2009. by the time myspace music launched in september 2008 i was on broadband ttnet and finishing engineering school. myspace was mostly where i looked for foreign bands rather than any kind of personal social presence. the music side was where i would land if i clicked through to a band page. that was about it.

the joint venture was announced on september 25, 2008. myspace bundled itself into a shared entity with three of the four major labels on day one. emi, the fourth and smaller major, joined a few weeks later through a separate deal. myspace put up roughly $120 million in development capital and built a streaming and artist-tools section that was supposed to compete with the just-launched lala and the still-iterating imeem, all of it under the shadow of the dominant itunes store. the launch made wired and the new york times on the same day.

the product itself was the problem. myspace music's streaming player was buggy from launch in ways that made the engineering reviews of the time slightly cruel. it was nested several clicks deep on the myspace homepage rather than being the homepage. the ad targeting it depended on rarely matched purchase intent at scale. and the discovery layer, which should have been myspace's only real advantage over itunes, was tied to band pages that were already starting to feel run-down by 2009 as friendster-era myspace users migrated to facebook.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

for about two years it actually worked at modest scale. by mid-2010 myspace music was claiming around a million tracks streamed per minute at peak periods, with the artist self-publishing side hosting profile pages for what news corp's own filings put at over fourteen million unsigned artists. those are large numbers if you read them in isolation. set against itunes hitting 10 billion downloads in february 2010 or against spotify already at six million paying subscribers by mid-2011, the myspace music numbers were small in the categories that paid bills.

the artist tools were genuinely useful. independent musicians used the bulk-upload and crowd-stats features to push tracks out before band camp normalized that workflow a few years later. that is the part of myspace music that the obituaries later got right. it was good for artists in 2009 in ways that competitors were not. it was not good for the labels who owned it.

~ the cracks ~

spotify arrived in the united states in july 2011, four months after news corp sold myspace to specific media and the irving azoff music group for thirty-five million dollars. that price had been one and a half billion six years earlier. by november 2012 techcrunch was running articles arguing that adding any kind of paid music tier to myspace would actively accelerate its decline since the user base was already shrinking and any added cost would push them out faster. myspace had lost forty-three million dollars in fiscal year 2012 alone according to news corp filings. the music joint venture stayed nominally alive but had no path to profitability.

the deeper crack was structural. the labels in the joint venture had used myspace music as a hedge against itunes pricing in 2008. by 2011 spotify was the platform-level partner the labels actually wanted. myspace music kept running but no longer had the strategic attention from any of its parent labels. the engineering pace slowed and bug reports stopped getting addressed. each homepage redesign of 2011 and 2012 pushed music further down the navigation rather than pulling it forward.

~ what got buried with it ~

on june 11, 2013, the specific-media-and-justin-timberlake investor group launched the rebooted myspace, throwing out almost the entire old code base and starting again with a music-focused design that was its own product rather than a continuation of myspace music. the joint venture wound down quietly over the following year. by 2014 there was nothing left to call myspace music except a redirect to the new platform's music tab. the legal entity dissolved without any public announcement.

what got buried was the only real-scale attempt to put all four majors inside a social network rather than alongside one. that did not happen again. when spotify added a social feed in 2011 the labels supported it through licensing rather than through equity. when apple music added connect in 2015 the labels were not equity holders. myspace music's combination of platform plus equity stake plus label catalog was the last attempt at the structure that nineties media wanted streaming music to take. it did not survive contact with spotify, which had no labels on the cap table and won the market with simpler economics.

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