MySpace gets another relaunch
Trying out a new haircut and revamping your wardrobe to try to win back a former lover who dumped you can be a bit sad. If it doesn’t work, trying it again with yet another new look is full-on tragic.
That’s the position MySpace finds itself in today as it makes one more attempt to regain the audience that has long since moved on, leaving the site as the place crappy bands go to be ignored.
To be fair, 54 million people still drop by the site, but it’s a far cry from its 2006 peak where in one month it was the most visited website among US users.
The new look site is currently under construction (sadly without a Geocities animated GIF to that effect) and users can sign up for an alert to get an invite. Hopefully that simply means getting early access to the new pages rather than expecting people to sign up again from scratch.
The plan is clearly to go even further with the music focus, with a little bit of a Pinterest rip-off thrown in. One of the new features is the ability to pair a photo album with a playlist, which will at least bring a new way for sensitive teenage boys to fail to impress girls.
Users can also look through details of new bands and gigs and then drag the relevant icons into virtual folders, presumably because the site’s designers have just used Windows 3.1 for the first time.
There’ll also be revamped pages for individual artists, with the example in the video being Justin Timberlake. That’s presumably because he’s the most popular performer among the target audience and not because he’s part owner of MySpace.
All in all then, I can’t see a single redeeming feature of the new look MySpace and can’t imagine why I would spend even a second on the site. But then, given the target audience, that probably means they’ve got things exactly right.
