MySpace
Cause of Death
Negligence compounded by corporate mismanagement, catastrophic technical infrastructure, and exposure to a superior competitor without adequate defensive strategy
Toxicology Report — Contributing Factors
News Corp acquisition: $580M (Institutional toxin, 2005)
Custom HTML/CSS profile pages that played music automatically (Chronic pain infliction)
Facebook News Feed invention (Competitive toxin, 2006)
MySpace Music rebranding attempt (Palliative care, administered incorrectly)
Last Words
""MySpace is now a place for entertainment." — Relaunch statement, 2013, describing a site that nobody visited to be entertained"
Witness Statements
""My profile song was 'Welcome to the Black Parade'. I changed it seventeen times in 2007. This was my primary form of emotional communication. I was 15. MySpace was exactly right for what I needed at the time." — Former user, now 34, with no regrets"
— Witness 1
""We sold to News Corp for $580 million and then watched them install an entirely new management structure that did not understand the product, the users, or the internet. They wanted to turn it into a media property. It was a social network. These are not the same thing." — Early MySpace employee, unnamed"
— Witness 2
""The top friends feature caused more teenage drama than any technology before or since. I removed someone from my top 8 in 2006. We have not spoken since. I'm not saying MySpace caused it. I'm saying MySpace gave it a stage." — Former user, reflective"
— Witness 3
""The page load times were unconscionable. Someone would put an autoplay video AND an autoplay song AND a glitter background AND a cursor trail on their profile and your computer would just... become quiet. Like it had given up." — Web developer, 2005–2009"
— Witness 4
Could It Have Been Saved?
Possibly, but the window was narrow. MySpace's core problem was that News Corp acquired a technology product and managed it as a media property. The technical infrastructure degraded while Facebook was improving daily. By the time MySpace attempted technical improvements, Facebook had the network effects. Social networks live and die by critical mass, and once users started migrating, the migration became self-reinforcing. The music vertical was a genuine asset that was never properly developed. A different owner might have saved it, or a different version of it.
Legacy
MySpace was where a generation learned that online identity was malleable, that you could choose your aesthetic and soundtrack, that digital self-presentation was a skill. It was also responsible for the autoplay audio tag, which the Bureau classifies as an ongoing crime against public peace. The music discovery element was genuine and real and significantly predated Spotify. The rest was mostly glitter cursors.
Bureau Epitaph
✝
MySpace
2003-08-01 — 2011-06-01
"Here lies MySpace. It let you customise your own corner of the internet, until the music started playing."