Take my friend Kavinsky for example, of Drive soundtrack fame. I can assure you that in 2007 he was already MySpace-famous for having the coolest looking page on there, complete with a tri-dimensional Tron moving floor. Compare that to Facebook where everybody has the same blue-grey theme that looks like the Post Office. Then of course, before murders were committed over relationship statuses, there was the choice of “Top Friends.” This was by far the most strategic chess move on the network. Placing someone in your Top 8 meant forging an alliance, one which you hoped would be reciprocated. You would put a few of your obvious allies, a couple of extended peers, and some oddball selections to show the depth of your character. A mysterious hot girl? David Lynch? An über-cool niche label from the ’90s?
Even the most straightforward functions of MySpace haven’t been replaced. Look at Facebook’s Fan Pages. How do you post your songs on there? Most people use Bandpage, a third-party app developed by Root Music which you have to embed onto a tab and grab your songs from your SoundCloud account, yet another social network. It’s astounding how complicated that is. MySpace had a music player where you could post six songs (another strategic selection from the artist), and non-musician users could grab one of your songs for their personal page, which turned the “Daily Plays” metric into an extremely useful measure of someone’s popularity beyond their number of friends.
Maybe he should just tell Jay-Z to buy it, or clone it.
