Why MySpace Can Still Win as a Music Destination
Ray Padgett is a freelance music writer whose work has appeared in SPIN, The Celebrity Café and an upcoming Bob Dylan anthology. He runs the music blog Cover Me. — Last October, MySpace reached an all-time low of 50.2 million unique visitors per month.
Context & Ripple Effects
By the time Ray Padgett made this argument, MySpace had spent nearly three years losing the general-purpose social war: it was down almost 20% in page views as early as September 2007, when Facebook overtook it in rank, and by October 2009 monthly uniques had fallen to an all-time low of 50.2 million. The strategic response under News Corp has been consistently musical — dating back to the 2007 decision to showcase music and sell performance videos — and accelerated in January 2010 with the completed acquisition of troubled startup Imeem and the resurrection of its Imeem playlists.
Padgett's case rests on that accumulated music infrastructure, not on the broader network. March 2010 coverage framed the same moment as a youthful reincarnation attempt, but the confirmed picture underneath is harsher: founding team members shown the door before Tom Anderson's own exit, mid-level management crumbling as experienced employees leave, and replacement hiring racing to backfill lost knowledge.
First-order effects
- MySpace is formally ceding the general social network to Facebook and repositioning around music, where its most tangible recent asset is the Imeem acquisition and its imported playlist users.
- The confirmed exodus of mid-level staff carrying critical knowledge — patched over by hiring more people — falls directly on whichever team executes the music relaunch.
Second-order effects
- Recorded-music rights holders gain a motivated buyer: MySpace's own 2007 playbook of selling performance videos points to licensing deals becoming the currency of its survival, giving labels leverage in negotiations.
- Confirmed weak results for search and brand ads on social networks undercut the display-ad model MySpace would otherwise fall back on, forcing it toward music-specific monetization rather than the standard social-network revenue mix.
Third-order effects
- If Padgett's thesis holds, the market structure it implies is a single general-purpose social winner surrounded by viable vertical destinations — meaning declining horizontal networks survive only by owning a content category, not by out-Facebooking Facebook.
- If it fails despite the music assets, the pattern points to distressed social properties being absorbed or shut down by parent media companies, with News Corp deciding which units keep spending — a live question given its rumored interest in Flixster as an adjacent social property.
The trend: Social networking is bifurcating between one dominant general-purpose platform and smaller networks that can survive only as vertical content destinations, with music emerging as MySpace's last defensible category.