Analysis and Review: Myspace Returns As New Social Music Site

The new Myspace has been launched, and it is gaining attention for its modern web design, which is responsive, clean, and provides an interesting user experience. The old MySpace lost its popularity quickly as Facebook took over the reigns as the largest social media site. It was sold in 2005 for $580 million to News Corporation. It is now owned by Specific Media LLC and singer/actor Justin Timberlake. Myspace has returned as a new social music site, focusing on artists and tracks rather than on companies and groups/pages like other social networks. The new site emphasises visual media with a modern design. The minimum size of a cover photo alone is 1024 x 768, larger than required on Google+ and Facebook.

The design overall bears many resemblances to the ‘Metro’ style used in Windows 8. The site uses horizontal scrolling, and is obviously targeted at touch devices. At first, the layout and navigation takes some getting used to, as its quite different from other sites. Myspace has a music player in the footer, which can be used no matter where you are in the site, and video content can also be played whilst navigating around the site. Mashable writer Pete Pachal has likened the new Myspace to what Apple’s Ping was probably intended to be like.

You can create an account with a Facebook or Twitter login, which makes it pretty easy to get started. Then you’re asked to enter your details, but not many. They’ve kept it simple as far as the possible options go. The Privacy options leave something to desire. It’s a case of, public or private. There are no other options, or at least not that I could find. I suspect that Myspace will be forced to change this as more users adopt the service.

One area where I found the new site quite weak was in the Profile feed. I suppose it’s meant to work similarly to Google+/FB/Twitter, but it’s not very intelligent. If you paste in a URL, it doesn’t do anything with it. Most social networks parse the URL and load the meta title and description, and a thumbnail in, but Myspace doesn’t. There also doesn’t seem to be any way of creating a business page/group, the site is solely focused on music artists. Perhaps this is a good thing, I guess time will tell.

Now, the question is, would you use it instead of YouTube or Spotify?