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Myspace now boasts 36M users and a 340 percent increase in artists using the network

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It was about a year ago that I got a call asking if I’d like to fly to L.A. to meet with the new Myspace owners – Tim Vanderhook, Chris Vanderhook, and Justin Timberlake – and get a demo of the beta version of the forthcoming relaunch. Because I’m a human being, the answer was obviously yes. Tying Timberlake’s name to Myspace was a weighty decision, and one that could overshadow the site itself. But despite this, I had to admit: This new Myspace thing was pretty cool.

Now it’s been a year and there have been some significant milestones: Myspace continued its reemergence at SXSW this past spring with a slew of secret concerts featuring impressive headliners, officially opened it’s doors in June, and launched its iPhone and Android apps.

Some of my initial enthusiasm toward the site has waned, but I continue to get alerts notifying me that users are connecting to me, suggesting that people are indeed using it.

Well today Myspace is releasing some hard numbers supporting this hunch: Myspace now has 36 million users. Just after the official launch, the platform saw a jump up to 31 million users and has kept on a steady pace since then.

The people driving this growth, according to Myspace, are “millenials and artists.”

“70 percent of the Myspace community is 35 or younger … the number of artists on Myspace has increased 340 percent since the relaunched, fuelled in part by artists including Pharrell Williams, El-P and Killer Mike (aka Run The Jewels), and CHARLI XCX.”

Musicians are dominating – no surprise there – but Myspace also notes that the visual aspect has drawn photographers and designers, “who comprise the second-most popular [type] of artist on the site.”

It’s impressive growth to be sure, and the momentum is working in Myspace’s favor. If there’s any criticism to be raised, it’s that a network of creators isn’t always sustainable. You need the symbiotic relationship between makers and consumers; Facebook’s success isn’t built on the backs of users who create things and host them there, it’s far more parasitic than that. We, the users, go out and find the things that other people are making and curate them there via Facebook Share or Exchange, or even just manual link-bearing status updates.

Of course, Myspace is not Facebook; it’s singularly focused on music (and art) discovery and streaming, so a direct comparison isn’t fair. Still, there must be some concern that an platform filled with artists needs pure listeners, too, and that demographic isn’t growing as quickly.

Spotify has, of late, tip-toed into including social elements in its streaming client – though there are far more restrictions to its setup than Myspace’s. Regardless, these two applications arguably have the most in common and compete for users. Spotify’s a tough opponent to take on, but Myspace continues to make a case for itself, and its relationships with up-and-coming artists certainly puts Spotify’s to shame.

We are a society of consumers, but there’s something to be said for unabashedly supporting creators. Now you just have to hope these artists get the listeners they so badly want. 

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Molly McHugh
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Before coming to Digital Trends, Molly worked as a freelance writer, occasional photographer, and general technical lackey…
Is Spotify Discover the music-social mashup we’ve been waiting for?
Spotify Discover

It seems like the formula could not be more ideal: Take music, make it social, profit. Music is inherently personal. People love to share it. Even bystanders participate as they listen.
As a concept, it seems perfect – but in practice, it has so far proven otherwise. We’ve witnessed more missteps than worth listing; many have tried and many have failed. More accurately, many have experienced flickers of short-lived success followed by (generally) a place in Web obscurity: Turntable.fm, Rdio, MOG, - need we even mention Ping? Sure, they’ve had varying degrees of success, but the true music social network remains beyond our grasp.
Or is it finally here? We went hands on with Spotify's new Discover feature to see if one of the most popular streaming music services has finally cracked the code to doing social right.
A familiar face
Did the Discover hub make you do a double take? Is there something familiar about it you can’t quite put your finger on? That’s because it’s like the new Myspace’s uglier, more functional cousin. When Myspace launched back into the limelight – much thanks to one Mr. Justin Timberlake’s mug all over its landing page – it attracted a lot of attention for how beautiful it is.

And beautiful it is. The horizontal scroll, the large, Pinterest-like take on images, the auto-appearing search function; it’s all stunning. Of course, sometimes innovative design is alienating, and users find themselves overwhelmed and confused by a service. Such has been the case for Myspace, though it’s something the site continues to address with updates, added functionality, and of course user growth.
Still, Myspace is more beauty than brains at the moment – and Spotify is trying to find the happy medium here. But we want it all, or at least we should. I want something as beautiful, immersive, and versatile as Myspace, but with Spotify’s functionality, ease of use, and intuitiveness.
So while the layout is familiar and far more interesting than the old default Spotify hub, it doesn’t appeal to our basic human instincts. I might not be a Pinterest fiend, but I get why people are: Because they don’t want to look away.
Does Spotify Discover ... discover?
I’ve long lamented the state of Spotify discovery. Of course “long” is a fairly relative statement: Spotify has been around for little more than a year now, and since then I’ve been a loyal and active user. I like the desktop software and its iTunes-like UI combined with a built-in, deep catalog of music. The Web app is similarly nice, though I seldom use it. The mobile app does just about everything I could ask it to.
My major - really, only - complaint has been music discovery. Pandora remains on top of this, the new Myspace is fairly impressive, and Google’s latest venture also proved more able than Spotify to find me new music I actually want to listen to (jury’s still out on iTunes radio as we haven’t be able to try out the new service yet). Spotify Radio has been an overwhelming disappointment (as evidenced by the sad state of my “Like from Radio” playlist), so when the music network launched its new Discover dashboard, I was more than ready to jump in and … start – fingers crossed – discovering.
A quick look at Discover reveals a much nicer-looking hub. The strange scroll of featured apps, popular music, and new additions to the catalog was never a very welcoming sight and most of us jumped right into our already-created playlists or started looking up new tracks (…or resignedly headed for Radio).
Now, Discover gleans data from your listening habits, your friends listening habits, as well as other data (playlists you’ve followed, music you’ve shared or liked). When you boot up Spotify, you’re greeted by suggestions – in plain English. “You listened to SOL. Here’s an album you might like,” Spotify says, prompting me to listen to an album from G-Eazy. “You listened to the Oh Hello’s. Here’s a song you might like,” Spotify says, referencing a song by The Apache Ready.
In addition to song and album suggestions, Spotify pulls from its Songkick app to tell me when acts I like are in the area. Sometimes it tells me I should follow a certain artist, or says it’s been awhile since I listened to a song I previously had on replay. It’s all very natural – and the best part is the infinite scroll. The personalized prompts and suggestions just keep coming. And if you don’t want to out and out commit to listening to a song, you can hold to preview.
Here’s the thing: This all works and it doesn’t work. If Discover’s goal is to keep me clicking and testing songs and artists and to keep on scrolling and scrolling, then Spotify’s nailing it. If the goal is to find new music I really like, it feels very much like throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks. It is, however, more effective than Radio: In one day of using the Discover hub, I like almost as many songs as I’ve liked from Radio after months of use.
The missing social link
In all of this, the same thing that’s always missing from the attempts at a music social network remains missing: A working social community. Spotify is easily the closest thing right now, but there are various missed opportunities for peer-to-peer interaction.
I watch my friends listening activity feed into Spotify, but I’m not able to thumbs up or comment – and sometimes I want to (“Yeah! I like this little-heard-of band too!” or “Weird, I know the lead guitarist of this group”). When I go to one of my friend’s pages, the only options for interacting with them is to follow or send music. I can’t leave notes or messages about someone’s playlist.
On the subject of playlists: The idea of making a collaborative Spotify playlist should be … ya know, collaborative. How about a Google Drive-like feature where you can chat with the other users inside a playlist so that the swap-and-drop of disagreed-upon tracks doesn’t turn into an all-out, silent war?
What Spotify has created is the closest thing to a music social network we’ve ever experienced, but it’s silent. We’re in there, playing music, finding music, looking at what others are doing, but it’s all quiet on the social front because we have a very finite amount of ways to interact with one another.
The verdict: Spotify’s shot at a social music platform is a good one – it’s just barely off the mark. The music social network continues to elude us, but from the looks of it, it won’t be able to much longer. 

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MySpace and Jimmy Kimmel partner up to stream live concerts

After its relaunch, rebrand, and overall self-reinvention, MySpace has announced what is presumably the first of many licensing deals that will see the site offering exclusive content currently unavailable elsewhere on the Internet. Well, not entirely... you might be able to find some of those content on television. Confused? Don't be; this is just MySpace's new deal with Jimmy Kimmel Live, of all places.
The ABC late night series, which moved into the 11:35 p.m. slot last summer to take on the late night heavyweights like CBS' Late Night with David Letterman and NBC's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, has announced a one-year deal with the reborn social portal. The agreement will allow MySpace to stream live performances of bands from the show, including tracks that won't appear on the live show broadcast.
In many ways, this partnership is a formalization of what JKL's rivals have been doing for years. Both Late Night and Tonight have offered online video of their musical acts for some time, with Late Night having run its own summer concert series - Live on Letterman - for some time.
The JKL performances streamed will be from artists taking part in the show's new summer concert series. These bands and solo musicians will perform extended outdoor sets that can last up to five or six songs, most of which are never seen by anyone beyond those actually present at the concerts themselves. Starting tonight, that will change with the webcast of Australian band Empire of the Sun's performance. The duo are expected to perform music from their new Ice on The Dune album - which will be available for streaming from a special Jimmy Kimmel Live-branded landing page on the site.All performances offered as part of the deal will be archived for later viewing, in addition to being livestreamed.
According to Scott Igoe, the music producer and booker for Jimmy Kimmel Live, the partnership between his show and MySpace is one that will benefit both parties. Not only will the newly-relaunched site gain press and, presumably, traffic from JKL viewers from the deal but, Igoe said, "with the newly launched Myspace as a collaborative partner, we’re looking forward to broadening the scope of what we can offer to an even broader audience." Or at least as broad as whatever currently makes up the MySpace user base.
Talking about the deal, MySpace Global Marketing VP Christian Parkes described the ABC late night show as "the go-to destination for the best music on late night," and pointed out that "Jimmy Kimmel Live has a great track record of recognizing new and emerging talent," something that the new MySpace is also angling to do for the Internet.

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Hands on: The Myspace app is a beautiful, confusing work in progress
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For a self-labeled social media butterfly, I’ve got a serious confession: I’ve never maintained a Myspace account (not to my knowledge, at least). I was too busy writing up killer testimonials for my friends on Friendster and when that got old, I turned to Facebook for some Mob Wars. The thought of signing up always nagged at me, but I never pulled the trigger. Until now.
The new Myspace is pretty sleek and shiny. It’s laden with bigger, cleaner visuals that give the site a more modern feel. The relaunch has been a much-discussed one, and now that Myspace is officially out of beta with an iOS app in tow, it's time to take yet another look at what the new Myspace is bringing to the social-media-meets-music table.
How it works
Joining Myspace is easy. Forget the irony in using Facebook and Twitter to sign in – that’s just how most sites are wired these days and using your existing login details lessens the hassle of remembering a new account. Upon signing in for the first time, you are immediately handed a short tutorial on how to navigate through the app:

Tap the create (+) button to add a status, animated GIF, or photo
Swipe up to access your music player; swipe down to hide it again
Tap the menu button or swipe right to see your profile, inbox, and the Discover panel

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