Posted inAnalysis, News

MySpace: ‘We tried to buy Spotify and they sure as hell were not selling to us’

Spotify’s launch in 2008 came at a time when the biggest social network of the time, MySpace, was about to lose its crown to Facebook. No wonder Spotify declined an acquisition offer from the sinking News Corporation subsidiary.

“Unknown thing: we tried to buy Spotify and they sure as hell were not selling to us. They didn’t need to,” said Sean Percival – formerly VP of online marketing at MySpace, and these days an investor at 500 Startups – during a dirty-laundry-airing speech at the By:Larm conference in Oslo yesterday.

Posted inAnalysis, News

Myspace still not dead, but ads are in the driving seat

Here’s a stat to wake you up this morning: Myspace still attracted 50.6m unique visitors in the US alone last November, generating more than 300m video views.

Not dead yet, then: in fact, the unique visitors figure is up 575% year-on-year according to Tim Vanderhook, CEO of parent company Viant. So, despite the widespread perception in the music industry that Myspace’s 2012 relaunch was a flop, the rebooted entertainment site claims it still has a large audience.

Posted inAnalysis, News

Myspace has 340% more artists, but how much are they using it?

Last night, Myspace announced some stats to show its post-relaunch growth. The company says it went from 24m users before coming out of beta in June to 36m now, and it had a separate number to show its growth with artists:

“The number of artists on Myspace has increased 340 percent since the relaunch, fuelled in part by artists including Pharrell Williams, El-P and Killer Mike (aka Run The Jewels), Riff Raff, and Charli XCX,” claimed the press release. And that’s interesting, but so is the question of how those artists are using Myspace. So we looked.