If you are the 80s or 90s kid, then Myspace wouldn’t be a foreign term for you. Launched as a social networking platform for musicians in the early 2000s where all songs and photos came into life, the site had soon acquired the status of a music discovery platform for the independent musicians.
While the portal managed to enjoy the limelight much before the advent of the social networking platform Facebook, it couldn’t, however, catch up much with the evolving trends, thus getting laid back as other competitors emerged and flourished. However, the platform remained on the league and was even purchased by the popular artist Justin Timberlake.
From being the largest social networking site in the world between 2005 and 2009, Myspace has seen an overall decline over the past few years. Despite the decline, Myspace had still managed to clock around 50 million unique monthly visitors in 2015, according to Wikipedia, and had nearly 1 billion active and inactive users. But since then, it has been reported that the number of Myspace users has steadily declined; all the latest redesigns and revamps going in vain.
It wouldn’t be wrong to tell Myspace is out there, still alive, though taking few hits and bruises here and there, probably waiting for a chance to make a comeback.
When the news broke out about the web portal losing a huge amount of data, I was left aghast. Blaming a server migration, the team recently put up a message on the website that said: “any photos, videos and audio files” uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available. The company was apologetic for the huge loss to its users.
Artists including Lily Allen, Kate Nash, and the Arctic Monkeys have reportedly lost all their tracks alongside millions of other music files. I lost mine as well; many of those being part of my early learning period – a very good memory, of course!
The portal where Tom Anderson was a common friend to everyone is no more as popular as it was once and has also lost a ton of money, users, and even trust of many users like me, thanks to the recent data loss. For artists, platforms like YouTube and Vimeo have proved to be more worthy, and sites including Instagram and Facebook have given them an edge over other platforms to interact with their fans.
It looks like Myspace is more of a casualty in the digital media war, and we can, sort of, call it dead, unofficially at least, except that you want to still be a part of a thing that is from the Pre-Facebook era!
Orkut is gone. Is it Myspace’s turn now to bid farewell? Only time can answer I suppose.
