MySpace turns 20: 5 things we’re still missing in the era of Twitter’s collapse
MySpace launched exactly 20 years ago today – so if you remember the pre-Facebook beast of social networking, it’s time to join us in celebrating its charms and quirks.
While looking at the charred remains of Twitter, it’s easy to forget how big MySpace was in the early 2000s. Shortly after its launch on August 1, 2003, MySpace overtook Google and Yahoo Mail in 2006 to According to data from Hitwise, the most visited website in America. For the rest of that decade, it was the world’s largest social networking site.
So what went wrong? A combination of acquisition by News Corp – which filled MySpace with new features and advertisements – plus the rise of Facebook meant that the “place for friends” quickly became a somewhat embarrassing joke. After a 2012 relaunch where it tried to be too many things, MySpace went on a slide that eventually made it the niche music website it is today.
But that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten the early years of the site. Not everyone on the TechRadar team looks back fondly on those early MySpace years, with our US editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff recalling that it “was like people’s brains had been turned inside out and whatever didn’t stick fell onto the page and was displayed as a GIF”.
However, many of us remember picking our Top 8s (the site’s weird ranking system for your friends) and decorating our MySpace pages with as many flashing lights as possible. So here are the top five things we miss about the original social network…
1. It was a place for real musical connection
MySpace was the best (and for a while the only) way to feel connected to bands I loved.
The year is 2006. Facebook launched, but that’s to ogle the current miens of historical crushes, superficial and impersonal “pokes,” plus the rejection of Scrabble requests from people you’re now glad you never graduated from high school. went out.
MySpace isn’t about silly faces and it’s not about geographic locations (I trotted around the world with quite a career as a professional dancer, thank you very much, but MySpace wasn’t about me). No, MySpace is a place to look out for – for bands expressing musical influences on a much deeper level, proud of upcoming tour dates and, crucially, album launches. In the pre-Twitter era, it felt so personal and real.
I felt like I understood what each of Patrick Watson’s gifted Montreal musicians brought to Close to Paradise, the potentially difficult second album that went alone and won the 2007 Polaris Music Prize, beating Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible. I celebrated the win in my little flat in London, thousands of miles from the Phoenix Concert Theater in Toronto.
And for a while I think only MySpace made this possible.
Becky Scarrott, Senior Audio Staff Writer
2. MySpace made me feel popular
Before Tinder, Bumble, Happn, Hinge and the rest, there was… MySpace? Yeah, sort of.
When the social network crashed onto our computer screens 20 years ago, smartphones weren’t a thing yet, so dating apps didn’t exist. There were certainly dating sites, but I, in my late twenties, would never have considered getting one.
Of course, I didn’t painstakingly craft my MySpace profile with romance in mind either. Far from it. When MySpace arrived I was working as a music journalist and it was the platform’s potential as a showcase for new talent that most excited me and my colleagues. Arctic Monkeys got their big break via demos uploaded to a MySpace fan page, and I spent many hours scouring the site for the next big thing.
I also spent many hours talking to people about it when I should have been working – and that was only because this newfangled social media thing made it possible for a socially awkward person like me to actually make friends (in a sense).
I had help here: my co-workers were all much cooler and more sociable than me, so it was very easy for me to rack up huge numbers of Connections just by riding their popularity. And in no time I was the king of social media! The popular boy I always wanted to be in school! Look, I have 200 friends on MySpace! Take that, school bullies!
The high was also the low for me. I got chatting with a friend of a friend of a friend, we hit it off and somehow we agreed to go on a date. This was clearly a bad idea because chatting to someone online is not the same as talking to someone in real life, especially for a socially awkward person like me. The date was a disaster and I never tried that again. However, I still enjoyed pretending to have hundreds of friends.
Marc McLaren, editor-in-chief UK
3. It actually taught me how to code
MySpace was my first interaction with a social media site. Outside of online chat rooms, like MSN Messenger, it provided a space on the Internet for you to own – much like a blog page.
I was encouraged by friends to enroll in school and, succumbing to the pressure, created a profile. Like Messenger, where it was “kewl” (why did we all type like that?) to use the plug-in that showed what music you were listening to, MySpace also had a dedicated music player. It was a space for self-expression, which meant changing the style of your profile page with HTML and CSS became a big part of it.
This was the early 2000s, when I didn’t know much about Web 1.0 or coding, and I didn’t want to buy a MySpace layout, so I ended up working out the basic prompts needed to hide my eight best friends, as well as to add some funky widgets that made my comments visible again using JavaScript or Flash.
I’m probably guilty of all the bugs that were on the site at the time – sorry, Tom!
Amelia Schwanke, Senior Editor for Home Entertainment
4. It was my favorite internet echo chamber
Many people, including my colleagues, remember discovering great bands and exciting new music on MySpace. But for me, my memories of MySpace are one of echo chambers and tribalism, albeit with a certain affection.
I was 15 years old, deep in a phase of tasty punk rock, wallet chains and baggy jeans. All of my friends were of the same nature—skateboarding, playing in local bands, and using MySpace to chat online outside of school. Through the magic of HTML and MySpace’s feature that allowed you to automatically play a song when you visited a page, scrolling through my best friends on MySpace would have assaulted your ears with a variety of alternate classics from Sum 41, Iron Maiden, Green Day, Rage Against the Machine, Korn… you get the idea. A mixed bag of sub-genres you could throw into a Spotify playlist these days with the title simply “rock.”
Our school was split in two: the alternative kids used MySpace, the sporty kids who listened to pop music chose Bebo, and the two will never meet. Rather than using MySpace as a tool to discover new music, it was a safe place to express our affection for the music we already knew and loved. I fondly remember MySpace as my first “virtual meeting place,” a village home tailored to my and my friends’ interests.
I switched to Facebook after all my friends did the same, and was disappointed with the lack of personality I was able to inject into the look and feel of my Facebook page. Where were my poorly animated flames? The autoplay music? Where was Tom?
I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of my experience with the corporate internet, a step away from spending my time online with MySpace, HTML and link-surfing the old Blogosphere, and spending more time in boxes set up by billionaires who scrape our data for advertisements. When I remember MySpace, I remember the heyday of the Internet, the advent of social networking and sticking to the man, Jack Black style. Fuck off, guys.
Matt Evans – Fitness, Wellness and Wearables Editor
It’s hard to say exactly when social media became the performative, carefully staged PR campaign it is today, but MySpace reminds me of the innocent days before mass brawls and billionaire takeovers. It was a bit like discovering your first favorite dive bar, before an inevitable takeover turned it into another sterile chain covered in fake graffiti.
Before TheFacebook.com escaped Harvard, MySpace was home to the photo albums that the unsuspecting pioneers of the early 1990s would later look back on with fondness and perhaps more than a little regret.
A good example is the bills and grainy photos of some of today’s greatest Premier League footballers, who have resurfaced to provide excellent WhatsApp ammunition for their teammates. The cruise album above from what appears to be football player Harry Kane is a particularly good example.
Still, the good news for anyone who uploaded some embarrassing songs, photos, or videos to MySpace before 2015 is that they’re all probably gone — in 2019, the social networking site blamed a faulty server migration for the permanent loss of 200 TB of data from its first decade of existence. Let out a collective sigh of relief from all those who had completely forgotten about their early MySpace adventures.
Mark Wilson, senior news editor