Oh, the days of organizing your Top 8 friends and hammering the "Add Friend" button for hours just to boost your band page's friend count. I could go on for days about how wonderful the old MySpace was and how much it taught me in regard to HTML and social media, but that's not what this is about.
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| It's not great. It's not bad ... just not great. |
This is about the NEW MySpace and what it has to offer.
Mr. Justin Timberlake took over the site, sent out a beta version and recently released it to everyone for use. Within the first month of being open to the public, the old place for friends gained one million new users and it continues to grow - just not as fast as it should.
The new layout is unheard of. Instead of scrolling up and down, you scroll horizontally, which makes it disorienting for a new user at first. However, after a few gos at it, it starts to feel right.
MySpace was smart and kept their signature features: customizable profiles, Top 8s and profile songs. One complaint is that you cannot fully customize the HTML for your profile. Back in the day, web design was something we all had to learn to do. Some layouts were absolutely amazing, whether they were minimalistic or complex as Hell.
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| Simply beautiful. |
Anyways, after a few minutes of staring at the site, it's easy to see it is directed at bands, musicians and music Lovers alike. Everything has a song attached. Your photos. Your page. Your posts. There's even a Pandora-esque radio station module at the bottom of the page.
This is both cool and kind of a drag. It's a drag because it tells everyone what you've been listening to, which isn't as much embarrassing as it is annoying to see. I don't care that someone listened to Secret Well Kept by Bright Light Parade on repeat for three hours! (Guilty...: https://myspace.com/brightlightparade/music/songs)
It's cool because you can listen to a band's entire list of songs without paying attention to it. The ad disruption is very minimal and the actual player is pretty well-calibrated. You can discover new bands that you will grow to Love and listen to them all day.
In the good ole days, MySpace was a haven for new music and new bands. The MySpace-band era has since passed, but the archive is still out there, thank God. I Love all the female-front pop/punk bands and gritty deathcore bands that no one cares about. Some of that stuff is absolutely ingenious.
My hopes are high that this new layout and reinvention of MySpace will result in the re-occurrence of the "dream." I want to see some bands who are hungry. Bands who want to play, promote and get signed to a label just so they can play and dance in front of new people. That's what it's about and that's what MySpace allocated in the mid-2000s.
I did want to hit on the mobile app for a second. If it were up to me, I would likely just use the app instead of logging onto a computer if I was trying to be conversational with people. It runs smoother and is a lot faster than the desktop version. MySpace started going downhill once everything started getting bogged down and slow. They tried to make it too flashy and it pissed off a lot of peoples' CPUs.
I truly hope they cut back on the "connecting" aspect of the site. Just because I think someone's picture looks cool doesn't mean I need to "connect" to it and broadcast it to my 1,000 friends. Maybe taking this off would speed everything up just a tad bit.
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| Admit it. You got excited to see this once again. |
Maybe I'm just a fool who is stuck in the past ... the amazing past ... full of custom-made HTML codes, scene hair and garage bands. A past enriched in musical dreams, young Love and angst...
Look at me go. Daydreaming again.
If you haven't already, log into your old MySpace. If you forget your log in stuff, it's easy to recover. Even if you don't keep up with it, you owe it to your past self to check it out and visit who you once were.
Who knows, maybe you'll Love it again!
Anything beats Facebook.
Oh, and don't forget to add me on MySpace: www.myspace.com/st3washere
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