According to documents from Business Insider, the owners of MySpace are trying to raise $50 million in order to relaunch the once music-centre of the internet as a streaming music service to compete with Spotify and Pandora.
Once upon a time, before Facebook, Soundcloud, and the rest stole their thunder (and before Murdoch ran the service into the ground), MySpace was the place to find new bands and artists – with everyone streaming their music through the service. It all went wrong because it didn’t have the college-kids crowd that Facebook grew into a social behemoth from, and more importantly Murdoch was so focused on attempting to squeeze every last drop of money from the service by plastering it with very annoying and intrusive ads, and so people left. Everybody left. Which is why Specific Media, now Interactive Holdings, were able to pick up what was one of the biggest sites on the internet for just $35 million.
The MySpace redesign has gone down a storm, even though all anyone has seen of the service is a very slick promotional video. MySpace’s traffic has gone up 36% in 2012, a huge turnaround from the rapid decline over previous years, but now we see what the New MySpace will actually be – a music streaming service – is it too late to get into that game?
There are already a number of big players in the field including Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, and Apple is rumoured to have something ready for launch very soon. yes MySpace will have direct influence from big names in pop like Justin Timberlake, who is an investor, but the real challenge is getting bands and labels to use the service on top of all the other offerings they already have that perform basically similar functions. MySpace doesn’t have the user base at this point to rival the likes of Spotify or Pandora, or even the upstarts like SoundCloud which has cemented itself as the “YouTube of sound” over the last couple of years.
More competition is always a good thing, but the New MySpace has a long long way to go before anyone can call it a success once again.