The owners of Myspace have hinted at plans to relaunch the once-dominant social network.
Chris and Tim Vanderhook, who bought the flailing website in 2011, said in an upcoming documentary called Myspace that they intend to bring it back. 'We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace,' Chris said, according to People. 'We’re just waiting for the right time to do it. And if that one doesn’t work, we’ll do it again.'
A brief history of Myspace
Myspace was founded in 2003, a year before Facebook, and boasted more than 10 million users in the UK at its peak. Teenagers filled their profiles with garish GIFs, sparkly bubble text, playlists, and rankings of their top eight friends. The site was sold to News Corporation, owned by Rupert Murdoch, in 2005 for $580 million. At that time, more people browsed Myspace than Google, according to comScore.
Metro’s picture editor Myles Goode, whose photo with a floppy black fringe appears in the original report, said he used Myspace to learn coding and design. 'I now do this for a living – 2006 me would scream if he knew I was making graphics and animations for money,' he said. 'Also the fact it was secondary to actually socialising and wasn’t taken super seriously, unless of course you wasn’t in your best friend’s Top 8.'
Myspace also served as one of the world’s largest music catalogues, with some 52 million songs.
The Vanderhooks’ acquisition gambit
As Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter lured users away, the Vanderhooks persuaded Murdoch to sell in 2011. Chris said News Corp was not returning their calls, so they faked a press release claiming pop star Justin Timberlake had joined their acquisition team – which was not true. Tim recalled: 'We found out that the guy from News Corp who was in charge of making the decision was at a conference in Palos Verdes. We meet him outside the conference. He says, “You better not be f**king lying about Justin Timberlake.”' The gambit led to a meeting with Timberlake, who agreed to join and helped the bid succeed.
Tim said they tried to modernise Myspace but it was a different company by then. 'It wasn’t the same Myspace. By that time, they had been through four other sets of management and CEOs. We were going to be the fifth ones, and I think that there were a lot of the people who were really just done,' he said.
Appetite for a return
Chris DeWolfe, one of the co-founders of Myspace, told People last week that there is a big appetite for a music-driven website like Myspace. 'I do think the algorithms have a lot to do with the addictive nature of social media. Everything’s programmed to you and what you’re going to like, with the complete and total notion of increasing the amount of minutes that you’re going to spend on a particular social media site,' he said.
This is not the first time a Myspace revival has been teased. In a since-deleted post on Threads in January, co-founder Tom Anderson said that if he reached one million followers, he would 'talk Myspace'. He refers to himself on Threads as the 'Former 1st friend' – Tom would automatically be a user’s friend when they joined. Many millennial users expressed excitement, with one commenting 'MILLENNIALSSSSSSSSS ASSEMBLEEEEEEEE!!!' and another saying 'Can we please bring back MySpace, like it was?! We didn’t know how good we had it! We’re sorry! Please, help us!' However, Anderson removed the post after criticism over his investments in SpaceX.
