Repost of CSU Signal

When I was in high school Myspace was all the rage. We spent hours taking bulletin quizzes, changing the music on our profiles and rearranging our top eight friends depending on who we were dating or hanging out with most. That all changed when Facebook opened up for high school students in 2005 and we all went running to greener pastures. MySpace has since become akin to a forgotten 80’s band who brings up good memories through thick and thin.

That may all change as Justin Timberlake (owner of Myspace) teased a total redesign of Myspace in an online video. This is the biggest shift for Myspace since its founding and has obviously been in the works for a few years to focus on their biggest market, music.

Even as the users have fled, the bands have mostly stayed. People have wrongly thought that Myspace is in competition with Facebook or Twitter for years, but it has clearly been trying to dominate the online music market. Myspace’s biggest competitors are now Spotify, Pandora and Last.fm, none of which are social networks on their own. The changes in the video appear to make this clear. The “new Myspace” will allow people to login with either Facebook or Twitter which is a smart idea because it will keep the barrier to entry (or reentry) to a minimum.

I hate Spotify, Pandora and Last.fm. I want to love what Myspace is doing. I hope for only a few things and I will probably visit Myspace as much as YouTube to listen to music. I want the music on my Myspace profile to match what I already own and listen to. From what I already listen to, I want it to suggest songs to listen to and not automatically play them in a fake “radio station.” The greatest part of music is listening to it with friends and suggesting music to each other. Myspace needs to suggest songs that my friends like, but be smart enough to know I don’t have the same tastes as all of my friends.

Until the release you can go to new.myspace.com/ and request an invitation with your email, but there is no set release date. It is time to clean up your profile, change your picture from that awful picture when you were 13, make new friends and update your music tastes.