MySpace, dear old MySpace. What are we to do with you?

For a couple of years now MySpace has been losing users by the millions. It seems nobody has a good word to say about it anymore. And that’s understandable: you only have to visit it’s homepage to be bombarded with big images, movie clips and in your face advertising. Once logged in it’s interface is slow to load and clumsy to do anything with. What once was the only website to be seen on, has now become a graveyard of unused profile pages; pages left because nobody can be bothered to go in and delete them. There was a time when I couldn’t even visit it because, due to the amount of movie files and flash activity, it would crash my computer.

Launched in 2003, MySpace was for a few years the leading social networking site until it was overtaken by Facebook in 2008. While it has it’s faults, Facebook has never allowed it’s uses to mess with the design of it’s pages and one look back into MySpace and you can see that maybe the allowance of glittery backgrounds and animated movies as part of a profile pages was the first of many nails in it’s coffin.

Statistics show that between January and February alone MySpace lost 10 million users. Sad really to think that it was once the most visited site in America, surpassing even Google in 2006. Don’t get me wrong it’s stills popular site – ranked 103rd most visited site in the world and still maintaining, for some reason, millions of users.

For all it’s redesigns and rethinks, MySpace’s decline is ongoing and it’s demise in the not too distant future is surely a certainty. Where just two years ago the site employed 16,000 members of staff now they have just 200.

So, what is to become of it? Like a champion race horse or a trusty, faithful pet dog, should it now be put out of it’s misery? Justin Timberlake doesn’t think so for along with Specific Media he bought the company for $35million – quite a bargain when you consider that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation valued it at around $327 million in 2005.

There’s no doubt that MySpace should go down in history as a game changer. It was the first big global social media site. Just for what he did to the music industry alone it should be acknowledged. Most famously it helped launched the careers of Lily Allen, Kate Nash and more but, coming as it did, at the same time as iTunes, it also gave other musicians a platform from which they could share their music and gain an audience without having to go through the traditional record company route. Artists could sell their music and announce their tour dates from the comfort of their own home. At last musicians had the freedom to get their talents heard and reap all the rewards themselves… well until a record exec showed up with his cheque book and offered them the chance to do it for them.

So what changed? Well, Facebook, with it’s cleaner layout and easier to use interface, came along and blew everything else out of the water. Although it didn’t initially offer musicians as many possibilities as MySpace, with their audience ignoring the latter they realised they weren’t actually sharing their music with anyone. The emergence of sites such as Reverb Nation, SoundCloud and BandCamp soon meant that artists could create their own websites that expressed their own personalities and from which they could sell their music.

Simply Marvellous Creative, in the last couple of years, have helped many musicians, at varying stages in their career, promote their music by giving them the website that they want and as a company that has experience in all aspects of design we can see that all the creative necessities of a musician can be taken care of under one roof as well as ensure that the same design styles are carried across from logos and flyers through to CD artwork and merchandise.

Data sourced from Wikipedia