When freshman Kristen Varallo was hanging out with her friends, she wanted to sign into Myspace to see her old account activity.
“We decided to get on to see our old pictures and I couldn’t remember my account information, so I just decided to make a new account and it ended up being a cool thing,” Varallo said.
The social networking website launched an entirely new platform this past June and increased to 36 million users and is steadily escalating. After the relaunch of Myspace, the site is primarily focused on people fulfilling their passions, such as musical artists, writers or comedians and they are able to connect to other people who share the same passions.
Manager of Marketing at Myspace Sean Dore said there are three main features the site has for users.
There are profiles, streaming which allows people to sort through the 53 million songs and videos making it the largest digital music library beating out Spotify and discover where users are able to find other artists and read features about them.
“When we built the new Myspace, we wanted to provide a space for people to kind of collect all of the things they think are interesting or speak to them in some sense,” Dore said. “It’s really a platform built for freedom of expression.”
The site offers artists ranging from musicians to photographers to build upon their careers and get their work out to the public in an inexpensive way.
Dore said in the case of someone like Adele, where her friends created an account behind her back, she was signed extremely fast right afterward.
“There are a lot of people who are recording music in their free time and there are lots of places where people can share and discover music,” Dore said. “To give someone value, Discover is a place where we do that.”
Varallo has a passion for writing and said Myspace helps get her writing clips out to the general public. She has a blog and uses the social network to advertise her work and it has helped so far.
“I have met other people on there who are aspiring writers and it is a great way to meet people to talk to them about what you do and what you love and it gets your work out there,” Varallo said. “Once you put something out there, you have people respond to what you do and it helps define those pieces.”
One of Myspace’s core audiences is college students and while designing the new site, the company thought about discovery, collaboration, simplicity, authenticity and transparency, a Myspace spokesperson said.
“The music player is easy and fast,” the spokesperson said. “It’s seamless, it’s persistent and it’s always there. You can drag-and-drop, watch full-screen videos, whatever you want. What has been built into the new Myspace platform is powerful, designed by artists for artists and simply unmatched on other social networks.”
