MySpace

~ how it started ~

MySpace launched in August 2003. By June 2006 it was the most-visited website in the United States, ahead of Google. In 2007 it was valued at $12 billion. In 2011 News Corp sold it for $35 million. In 2019 the company announced that it had accidentally deleted twelve years of user-uploaded music in a server migration. That was the second death.

The site is still online. Tom Anderson, the co-founder, technically still appears as your first friend if you log in. The architecture is intact. But the cultural moment ended around 2009-2010 as Facebook lapped it, and by 2011 the migration was complete, but mySpace is the most precise example we have of an internet ghost town.

~ on paper ~

~ the top 8 ~

The Top 8 was MySpace's defining feature and arguably the source of more high school drama than any other piece of software ever made, because your profile displayed eight friends, in an order you chose, prominently. Whoever was in slot one was your favourite. Whoever you removed from your top 8 received a message, telepathically, that you were no longer their favourite. The act of demotion was the loudest possible way to communicate "we are no longer close."

Friendships ended over the Top 8, but marriages were arguably proposed via slot 1. Best friend status was negotiated by checking each other's lists at 11pm on a Sunday. There has been no widely-deployed social product since with this feature, because every product manager who has considered shipping it has imagined the customer support tickets and shuddered.

~ profile customization ~

MySpace was the last social network to allow full HTML/CSS customisation of your profile. You could paste raw <style> tags into a hidden box and rebuild your page from scratch. Profiles in the 2005-2008 era ranged from utterly broken hot pink-on-black scenecore disasters to beautiful designs.

Whole communities sprang up to share MySpace layout codes, "MySpace layout sites" were briefly a top-50 web category. Every teenager learned a tiny amount of HTML/CSS in service of making their profile look more like the inside of their head, and many software developers from that era cite MySpace as their first programming experience.

~ the profile song ~

You could embed a single song that auto-played whenever someone visited your profile. There was no mute button visible at the top of the page. Visitors had to scroll, find the embedded player, and click pause. The song was a statement: this is what i am right now. Often Death Cab for Cutie. Often My Chemical Romance. Often a song nobody else had heard yet, which was the whole point.

~ the collapse ~

MySpace died of bad management decisions, in this order:

• The 2008 redesign. News Corp had bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005. By 2008 they were under pressure to monetise and "professionalise" the platform. The redesign streamlined the interface and reduced customisation. Users hated it. Many migrated to Facebook in protest.
• The advertising decisions. By 2009 MySpace was running so much advertising that the page took 30 seconds to load on a typical home connection. Facebook, simpler and faster, was punishingly more pleasant to use.
• The leadership churn. News Corp cycled through three CEOs in three years. Each one had a different vision. None of them had a coherent product strategy.
• The 2019 data deletion. A botched server migration in March 2019 was reported to have lost twelve years of user-uploaded music files: 50 million songs from 14 million artists, much of which existed nowhere else. This was the moment MySpace stopped being a dormant social network and became an open archaeological wound. A generation of musicians lost their early demos forever.

~ what disappeared ~

The HTML profile. No social network has shipped MySpace-style customisation since. The closest modern analogues are Carrd and Bearblog and the personal site renaissance, but those are not embedded in a social graph.

The social music discovery. Bands posted demos directly. Their fans heard them before the radio. Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys, Owl City, Sean Kingston, Soulja Boy, and Calvin Harris all have early-MySpace breakthrough stories. The current music industry is missing the bottom rung of that ladder.

The Top 8. Whatever you think of it, it was emotionally legible. You knew where you stood. Friend rankings exist on every modern platform implicitly; whose stories you watch, whose posts you like. But none make it visible. MySpace did. It was honest in a way social networks have not been since.

~ epitaphs ~

"i was in tara's top 8 in slot 4 from february 2006 to june 2007. then i wasn't. i never asked her why. we are still friends. we have never spoken about this. i think about it weekly."; d.b. 35

"my band's myspace had 14,000 plays in 2007. those were lost in the 2019 migration. our first three songs do not exist anywhere now. we are now adults with mortgages."; m.ö. 38

"i still know the html for a custom myspace background and you cannot take this knowledge from me.", e.s. 36