A new executive team at MySpace is trying to reignite the brand by focusing on entertainment – music, videos and games – as users leave for “cooler” destinations. In a strategy shift, MySpace will try to become an online hangout for people who want to connect with their friends over entertainment content – like the speculated release date of an upcoming Interpol album, celebrity blogs, or a karaoke contest associated with Fox’s “Glee”. As an entertainment site, MySpace would compete for ad dollars with a broader group of sites, including YouTube, Hulu, Pandora, and Lastfm, in addition to the current social networking champion, Facebook.
In order to succeed with this new strategy, MySpace will need to crack the code over the reigning question challenging social networking sites; how to engage users in more than just browsing friends’ photos or profiles, and long enough to allow brands and other properties to truly interact with these consumers (and generate revenue from these interactions). Perhaps music, concerts and videos are one way in – but Pandora and YouTube haven’t fully figured that one out yet, either. Here’s hoping the competition creates a more innovative and hybrid social networking and entertainment space.
[via Wall Street Journal]
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Posts are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:45 am
I’m in Newcastle, UK at the moment. Every poster or band has a Myspace account, I see MS graf all over the place, flyers and stickers. It seems well loved and pretty cool here for some reason…
Places like Newcastle often fall off the “cool radar” which is a shame really but also good, there’s a genuine underground here. Free of brands and corps. Kids, music, drugs, fun, experimentation. A proper honest-to-good scene free of pretension and scrutiny. Very refreshing.
October 17th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
I agree with Floyd, unsigned bands still have myspace accounts, but I think that not even the bands realise that the focus has ebbed away from myspace. Myspace is merely another opportunity for bands to market themselves but, just like old-fashioned fly-postering, it’s more miss than hit.
There’s no doubt that users have ebbed away from myspace, although I understand that this is not necessarily the case in myspace. That facebook has won out in the popularity stakes is not really disputed.
i think that myspace has a fundamental brand problem at the moment, specifically that its brand is regarded as a loser and uncool. once coolness (if myspace ever really had it) is lost (and in this case, myspace well and truly is the opposite of cool right now), it’s difficult to get back. and there’s nothing less cool than a big online brand acting like a try-hard. especially when it’s owned by a certain ex-aussie media mogul.
big online brands are obsessed with finding some magic everybody-pleasing website that people will use to do all their online business, i.e. find music, stay in contact with friends, make new friends, post photos/vids etc. When will online entrepreneurs realise that perhaps that is impossible and perhaps we/the internet is better for that.
October 20th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
“There’s no doubt that users have ebbed away from myspace, although I understand that this is not necessarily the case in myspace.”
….should have read: not necessarily the case in the united states (!)
October 20th, 2009 at 6:04 pm