Q & Answers: Thoughts on the New and Improved MySpace

You’re a big fan of the radically redesigned MySpace. In a nutshell, what do you like about it?

I’m excited about MySpace taking a much more clean, straightforward and succinct approach. They seem to be stripping down the superfluous stuff that made it such an unwieldy and terrible platform in the first place.  They seem to be embracing the homogenous profile concept that Facebook did but the interface is far more modern and new than what Facebook is currently doing.

With Facebook so embedded in our culture, can a new MySpace survive, especially with the baggage surrounding its name?

It doesn’t seem like MySpace is going after the Facebook crowd anymore. MySpace now seems to be going after the Spotify crowd and I won’t be surprised if MySpace and Spotify make a strategic partnership…or if MySpace becomes a Spotify competitor. Spotify may be mostly about music, but they have some nascent community stuff. Meanwhile, everything that the new MySpace is doing is about music and comedy albums — it’s all about tracks. It’s an entertainment and media community. If there was a way to create playlists on your MySpace, it could become the de facto music streaming site. Your profile alone makes it a potentially more robust service than Spotify. We’ll see if they’ll go in that direction, but I’d put my money on it. Right now, they’re a layer on top of music; if they can include music in that layer, it’ll make a lot more sense.

What feature appeals to you the most? Or what feature do you hope they’ll reveal?

I hope that they reveal playlists! I hope that it becomes more like Spotify! I would use MySpace over Spotify because the whole interface is a lot cleaner. Spotify is fine, but MySpace has a pedigree that’s interesting and I wouldn’t mind supporting it. I’m interested to see how people’s profiles connect to each other, since that seems to be a little of a question mark. It seems very easy to connect with artists, but if I type in someone else’s profile, nothing comes up. I’m curious to see how this evolves as more people get into it.

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