MySpace’s focus on music

MySpace Music announced further expansion this week. Computerworld says the site’s adding music features “in a bid to reinvent itself,” but you certainly can’t believe everything you read about social networking; music has been a core community for MySpace since the beginning. Its music channel’s traffic has grown 1,017% since its relaunch in September 2008. But here’s some of the new stuff Computerworld mentions: “a massive collection of music videos” (from MySpace’s record-label partners); “a new Video Search Tab”; and an Artist Dashboard. “The dashboard is designed to give bands and singers with MySpace profile analytics on who is listening to their music and how they’re interacting with it,” Computerworld reports. In fact, MySpace is in an entirely different space from Facebook and other social network sites now, its CEO, Owen Van Natta, announced at a conference this week, according to a great post at the ReadWriteWeb blog. MySpace always was as much a self-expression tool as a social one, while Facebook has always been a social utility (now with plenty of extras). See also “MySpace: Entertainment hub that tweets,” “MySpace’s metamorphosis,” and “MySpace’s PR problem.”