Have you seen the new Myspace video yet?
Oh, no?
Here it is. Go ahead, watch it. I’ll wait —
For anyone who knew WTF social media was before they got a Facebook account in 2007 when everyone else they knew was doing it — you may understand.
Myspace was built on music. When Friendster, which preceded Myspace by a year, started shutting down accounts created for non-real person, individual entities, Myspace opened its doors to bands. As these acts brought, and built, their fanbases online, Myspace grew, until, without understanding its full meaning or potential Myspace sold its hockey-stick growth curve to News Corp for $580 million back before you started paying attention, in 2006. From there, its fate was sealed. Myspace should have become THE online destination for music fans, the interactive MTV of my generation — but it wouldn’t. With Fox as its new parent, Myspace was doomed to creating an ever clunkier product in the name of increasing ad space — which is all News Corp could really understand about the medium, anyway. It opened up an ever widening gap which a “cleaner,” “simpler” competitor was perfectly poised to exploit.
But something strange happened on the way Myspace’s 10-year-long journey to become what it always should have been. Facebook bloated up, IPOed, fizzled. I cant imagine referring to Facebook as “clean” and “simple” now. Can you? I’m not sure I even really fully understand all the profile and content settings, let alone the endless apps and features. I use Facebook for a much more reduced function, essentially in deliberate spite of all its bells and whistles — I use it to keep up with people I already know. This was always what it was intended for. The musicians I know who use Facebook as a channel to engage their fans are the first to admit that for their needs they’ve basically had to hack the platform, contorting it around what it was natively designed to accommodate. Connecting fans with the music and musicians they love is something that was backed in on top of the original Facebook idea. It’s not part of Facebook’s DNA. It was Myspace’s.
We shall see if, under new management (which includes a musician), the new Myspace product itself lives up to the hype and the promise, but in the meantime, what we have is this video, which is perhaps the most elegant strategic execution I’ve seen all year.
First, the lyrics, from “Heartbeat” by JJAMZ:
Who am I to say I want you back?
When you were never mine to give away.
I was waiting for a long, long time for you to feel the same.
Who are you to look at me like that?
Is there something more you need to say?
I haven’t loved you in a long, long time,
so why do I feel this way?
Can you hear my heartbeat?
Please don’t stand so close to me.
Can you hear my heartbeat still beating strong?
Maybe I’m ashamed to want you back.
Maybe I’m afraid you’ll never stay.
Thought I hated you a long, long time.
There was my mistake.
I just can’t pretend that nothing’s changed.
Can you comprehend just what to say?
If you break my heart a second time,
I might never be the same.
Can you hear my heartbeat?
Please don’t stand so close to me.
Can you hear my heartbeat still beating strong?
If you’ve been in the social game a long, long time, you understand. There is an explicit double meaning in the lyrics of love lost about our relationship with Myspace; about Myspace’s relationship with us. We aren’t just watching a product demo, we are suddenly thrust into something else. We’re in on something with Myspace. It’s INTIMATE. And EMOTIONAL.
And if the soundtrack can do that, then it means something else too, something even more powerful. If the music in this video could get you to understand all this, to know all this, to feel all this, then the video is a statement about the very power of music itself. About what music can do, how it can affect us, what it’s capable of.
In the decade since Myspace first launched and then declined into spammy, irrelevant obsolescence, record stores closed and the music industry shrank and a gazillion new social music apps and platforms came and went and pivoted and the internet killed the rock star and turned every band into a startup and nothing arrived to fill the gap left behind by what Myspace should have been. There has always been something missing, and this video makes it clear that its creators know what that black magic element is. What has been missing is an experience that can support, that can reflect, and that’s built for why it is we love music in the first place. THAT is what Myspace was always supposed to have become. And I hope it still does.