This week Myspace announced that it is cutting nearly halfits staff, some 500 jobs, in a move that suggests News Corp. is planning tosell the struggling social network. The news hasn’t surprised observers. Thesite had been losing ground to the fast-growing Facebook for years, and slashedits workforce by 30 percent in 2009.
It’s easy to see why Myspace is on the wane. A cesspool of errors, pop-up adsand blown-out CCS coding, its user experience is inexplicablyawful for a website of its funding and stature. The customizable profiles that wereintegral to Myspace’s initial appeal quickly threw the site into disorder, and thesite’s dysfunctional interface alienated users while prohibiting programmers fromimplementing the innovations that made the much more orderly Facebook sopopular.
Most troubling, the site’s security loopholes grew worse each year.When I last used the site two weeks ago, attempting to steam a major-label album, it infected my laptop with a viciousvirus called Palladium. This wasn’t justa standard-issue spyware program easily remedied with a couple computer scans;it took my operating system hostage, and exorcising it required hours of hand-scrubbing system registries. It was avirus of the sort you might expect from an illegal file sharing site, but notfrom a legitimate, legal music streaming site.
Yet Myspace’s collapse is bittersweet. The site’s contributions to music were even greater than most realize. By creating a centralized, easy-to-access hub for bands to post theirmusic, the site helped artists of all statures grow their audience, empowering independentmusicians like never before. Certainly not every group that started a Myspaceprofile secured a lucrative record deal, but most of them came away with something:extra fans, a little more exposure, maybe a press write up they otherwisewouldn’t have received. Musicians too stubborn to use Myspace missed out onopportunities they didn’t even know existed: I saw firsthand how music writersand magazine editors really did scour the site for deserving talent to expose.
The flight from Myspace has created a real vacuum. Though Facebookhas superseded Myspace as the default web presence for most musicians, offeringamenities Myspace could never top like a seamless events engine that makes iteasy to publicize concerts, Facebook just doesn’t facilitate the discovery of new music the way Myspace did. In fact, searching for bands by genre or location is just about impossible on Facebook. Mismanaged as it was, Myspace made music a realpriority, creating innumerable breaks for musicians both big and small,something in which Facebook has shown little interest.
The Death of Myspace
And why it's not a good thing
