"In the Blue Corner, having registered his 100 millionth member and from the United States of America Tom "Myspace" Anderson! And in the Orange Corner, weighing in with 350,000 members from Sweden/Germany, Alex "& Erik" Soundcloud!"
So I thought I would share my opinion with you on something...
I have seen a major shift recently in the weapon of choice for musicians online (in the dance music sphere anyway) towards Soundcloud.
I love everything about Soundcloud. The branding, the cool players, the nice looking waves, the friendly error messages and the fact that a basic account is free.
But can it really contend with a heavyweight like Myspace, and can it be seen as a possible successor?
Certainly Facebook does not have a sniff when it comes to being a hub for Music, and although the social aspect of online activity in the main seems to have moved to Facebook and Twitter, Myspace have always clinged to their status as a "space for music"
New Myspace Music
Recently Myspace invested one or two dollars in a brand new all singing and dancing music streaming system, to try and cope with the ever encroaching Spotify, Napster, Last FM and the like.
Meanwhile, away from all this pop music orientated frenzy and glossy advertising, Soundcloud has been quietly asserting itself as a standard in a market that Myspace seems to have forgotten about - Dance Music.
I think this is the reason that Myspace profiles of artists and labels within our scene are beginning to look more and more tired without the day to day maintenance and activity. Spam messages build up in comments sections, blogs become stale, and music players get dusty.
In a further effort to modernise, Myspace installed traffic reporting modules into music profiles, and I think this will end up being their worst enemy. For the first time, you can accurately see who is looking at your profile, where in the World they are from and how long they are there for.
The Venga Digital Myspace is receiving precious little traffic, and I am seeing a real dip in the amount of plays on dance music artists' music players literally like 10% of the amount I was seeing this time last year, which bhegs the question - why are we spending resources keeping it up, and duplicating work that we're already doing on Soundcloud, Facebook and on the homepage?
Would we be better just sticking a big banner up there saying "Sorry, we've moved"??
For what it's worth, I surf Soundcloud profiles where I used to surf Myspace Music profiles, and I catch up with friends on Facebook when I used to speak to them on Myspace.
To be honest, I rarely use Myspace... and I am feeling that the same is ringing true for other artists and labels.
The problem is with Myspace, is that it is dated and cumbersome, you can only operate within Myspace. If you are on Facebook, Soundcloud, Twitter, Youtube you can feed your activity to any other profile, integrate it with other applications and combine them all! Myspace has no such exportable features, and again it is another potential nail in a coffin.
Myspace does have one saving grace... it is personalisable and gives brand presence, and unless Soundcloud start letting you loose with "Pimp my Profile" backgrounds (unlikely) it may just about survive, in lieu of the artist having a web site themselves.
It is funny that all artists and labels used to have fancy websites, then they ditched them all for social media sites, where now I think the smart money is on resurrecting the website (or using a blogspot/wordpress blog you can customise) and using it as a central point to feed blog posts, Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and Youtube into it.
Interested to hear any thoughts on the above, do you use Myspace any more?
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