Was Myspace the best music site?

In “Top Eight: How Myspace Changed Music,” Music Journalist Michael Tedder argues that the social hub tapped into something special that no other music sites have been able to duplicate.

Michael Tedder has written about music, entertainment, health, and masculinity for Stereogum, Esquire, Vulture, Playboy, The New Republic, The Village Voice, and other publications. He’s a former managing editor for the music magazine CMJ and the pop culture magazine Paper, and was a founding editor of the critical discussion website The Talkhouse.

Tedder’s new book, “Top Eight: How Myspace Changed Music,” is available now for pre-order, and releases August 15.

MUSIC NERD spoke with Tedder over Zoom earlier this week.

Let’s start with the basics: What was Myspace, and how did it come to be?

Myspace launched in August 2003. It was not the first social media site, but it was the best back then. It wasn’t fueled by an algorithm, but run by music fans, for music fans. It didn’t advertise itself that way, but that's what everyone there felt like. 

Other sites had popped up in the late-90s and early 2000s, mainly dating sites and message boards. Friendster had launched in March 2002 and took off quickly but had limitations. You could only see profiles of people you were already friends with.

[Myspace co-founder] Tom Anderson had dropped out of the UCLA film school and was in a punk band called Swank. He had worked in online marketing. Tom was a huge music fan, his favorite band was Weezer. He thought, what if you went onto a website and found everyone else who likes that same band you like? 

Your new book, “Top Eight: How Myspace Changed Music,” available August 15, argues that the MySpace era was unprecedented and occurred “when the internet was still fun.” Can you elaborate?

We had never seen a site like Myspace. It was easy to scroll through and find people who seemed like they'd be your friend. You could find people in your town, at your school, maybe have something in common. There had been precursors like LiveJournal, and Makeoutclub catered to emo and indie rock fans, but you had to know someone to enter those clubs.

Myspace was easy for anyone to stumble upon. You could be a teenager and no one else in your school likes Death Cab For Cutie, but you get on Myspace, you could find your people, and that's fun. Tom [Anderson] at his heart was a music fan who wanted to have fun.

Generally speaking, who were the main people or communities using MySpace? In what ways?

Back then, it wasn't common to be online all day, but emo kids latched on quickly because they were already online. Emo, pop punk kids, Korean club kids in LA, and people in Hawaii, they loved Myspace. Rap, hard rock, and pop stars eventually had a big presence but it was the emo kids first. 

What else was happening in the larger media landscape at the time Myspace kicked off?

By the late 90s, there was a lot of consolidation in the music industry. We went from about five companies to four, which was actually a huge shift. The Telecommunication Act passed in 1996, which reduced regulations on media ownership. Clear Channel bought up all the radio stations it could, so there was more corporate control. 

Radio stations went very quickly from like 25-song rotations to maybe like 10-song rotations. Fewer women were being played. MTV followed suit. By the summer of 2000, it was basically Creed, Papa Roach and Britney Spears. That consolidation led to less choice, so people went elsewhere, like Napster and Live Journal, and eventually Myspace.

Can you walk us through the Myspace trajectory?

Myspace launched in 2003, and really caught on in early 2004. Around 2006, Myspace replaced Google as the most used website. 2006 is also the year that Ruport Murdoch outbid Viacom to purchase Myspace. 2007 was a boom year. Myspace launched verticles for film, music, books, comedy, dating, karaoke, and political activism.

Myspace was built on [Adobe’s] ColdFusion platform, and it could get very buggy. Murdoch struck a deal with Google for advertising. You had all these users sitting on a website with a shaky infrastructure. The website became slow to load and spam became common. Users got frustrated. Murdoch made promises he couldn’t deliver, the website was flailing, and then Tom left, and that was the beginning of the end.

In 2019, it was reported that Myspace had lost roughly 50 million songs and 12 years worth of content were permanently lost. What happened?

Myspace was eventually purchased by an advertising company for less than a 10th of what Murdock had paid for it. They tried to relaunch, then another company tried, then [American media corporation] Meredith bought it. A lot of valuable info got lost along the way. This once monumental website had fallen so far and yet nobody really noticed. 

Why did you want to write this book?

If you were around in the early 2000s and you were a music fan, Myspace felt free. Things had gotten very top down in the industry, but it felt like a time of discovery and authentic passion, especially around emo bands in Myspace. 

For a while, a band like Panic at the Disco or Grizzly Bear or Bon Iver could blow up because of the fans. Today, with streaming, algorithms dictate what you will hear. You can work around that but it's gotten harder. Back then it was easy. We’ve lost that. We need it back. The culture right now feels stagnate. We need to get back to that fan-driven mode of being. The book shows what went wrong. 

You could argue that sites like TikTok, Instagram, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Redditt, and other hubs have picked up the baton from MySpace, at least in some ways. What’s changed?

I agree, a lot of different elements of Myspace are still around, but it’s not the same. TikTok is great at breaking a song. Memes can get huge. It's great at viral moments, but not at creating a lasting fan base. I love Bandcamp, and Soundcloud was a special moment. And now there are Discord servers. People complain now that they have to go on all these different platforms and it’s exhausting. Back then, Myspace was the only one. Myspace had everything at once.