Myspace..What's that?

What seems like a lifetime ago, Myspace was the social networking site ideal for up and coming musicians. It was basically what Twitter is now, back in the day Myspace used to be the most common platform for young people to create a webpage to express themselves as that was where they felt they had creative freedom. The site allows you to share videos and music on your profile, which is why it is ideal for upcoming musicians to promote themselves in order to gain a bigger fan base and hopefully make it within the industry.  Many have been noticed through this platform and Sean Kingston is an example of that. Sean Kingston is now a major artist within the industry with songs that have topped charts internationally, doing collaborations with artist like Nikki Minaj and Justin Beiber who are well respected artists within the industry.

 Myspace isn't too well-known anymore and has decreased in popularity rapidly since 2008 because all of a sudden with YouTube's debut we have all turned to YouTube forgetting about MySpace, to some extent I think you could say that MySpace is no longer a channel that people would promote or distribute their music through anymore, it used to have over 100 million global users, its UK audience has halved to 3.3 million monthly visitors in July 2010 (Telegraph). Compared to competitors, Myspace's number feel even more by 2004 when Facebook was launched themselves. Facebook had 500 million registered users and Twitter (launched 2006) already had over 100 million users, however these sites were only competing as social network sites. YouTube is the the site that directly competes with Myspace as a music level. These days YouTube is the most effective form of promotion for new artists.

We can measure the difference in value of YouTube and Myspace by the price that each was sold for to a new corporation: Myspace was sold to Rupert Murdoch in 2005 for $580 million whereas YouTube was sold to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Showing that YouTube is a more beneficial channel of promotion and distribution although this does not mean that they dominate the music industry there also other sets that also have a significant online presence.

Overall I could confidently say that Youtube is now the major 'go to' platform in terms of music artists. Myspace is considered redundant by most web users whereas YouTube has atleast 24 hours of video uploaded and exceeds 2 billion views a day. The viral success of Gangnam style justifies my point on how much of an impact that YouTube has on us.

I found this out from....

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_viewed_YouTube_videos
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/myspace/8243403/MySpace-by-numbers-how-it-compares-to-its-rivals.html
• Class notes