A “New Myspace” preview video was released and, you can take a look below for yourself, but the interface and overall design looks pretty decent.
The Myspace Backstory
Myspace is known for being one of the first social media giants to rise and one of the first social media giants to fall.
Since it’s peak in 2008, Myspace has been steadily on the decline.
Justin Timberlake and Specific Media gained ownership of Myspace in mid 2011 and it appears that Myspace is going to try and make a comeback in late 2012 / early 2013.
Myspace was always very popular in the music industry and helped many groups and bands gain fans that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to obtain as easily.
The “New Myspace” Appearance
After taking a look at the video below, the 2012 version of Myspace looks very aesthetically pleasing.
It appears to be simple, sleek and intuitive.
The social media platform appears to maintain its focus on music in several ways. A music player is visible at the bottom of the user’s screen and follows the user to whatever page they access on the site.
We are shown previews of artist and album playlists, as well as custom made playlists.
It appears that musicians can still upload and link their music to Myspace and we even see the preview of a feature where musicians can see who is listening to their music across the World and what specific regions their music is trending in.
The 2012 Myspace preview video presents a very “image-centric” look and appears to “borrow” design elements from Facebook, Pinterest and even Spotify.
The profile page of the New Myspace seem to copy Facebook Timeline almost precisely except for the fact that it scrolls horizontally instead of vertically.
It is hard to tell from a demo video whether Myspace will be able to catch on and gain some steam in the social media industry or not.
Facebook users have been very vocal over the last year in regards to their displeasure with the Facebook Timeline update and that may be part of the reason why Google+ recently announced that they surpassed the 400 million user mark.
That being said, it seems unlikely to me that a social networking tool focused directly on the music industry could steal massive amounts of users from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter without boasting some very unique and innovative features that we have not yet seen in the social media arena.
Let me know what your thoughts are in the comments section below and if you’re interested in beta testing the “New Myspace”, you can head over to new.myspace.com to sign up.
