What’s coming at Myspace? Their new pitch revealed

The demise of Myspace has been a bit of an in-joke among tech and marketing circles over the past few months, as many people are wondering just how they could get it so wrong and how they could fall from such a height so quickly and so messily. Call it what you want now, but they were once ‘the’ social network and were in many ways pioneering in the social technology space. It all went very wrong for Myspace, but now it seems, they are back. Or at least they have a plan to be back. As they get ready to pitch at Ad Week, which is happening this week, All Things D have gotten hold of their creds deck, which shows the new direction for the site.

With the new plans for the site, music is evidently taking centre stage, with a heavy focus on content to capture and keep audiences.

Haven’t we heard this before?

Okay, so the new Myspace was unlikely to have a different focus on music, given it’s standing association with bands and investment in the form of one Justin Timberlake, who also stands as creative director at the site. But at the moment it all sounds a bit wishy washy. Specific Media (the owners of Myspace) have stated their aim is to “to feed the energy of youth culture everywhere.” No, I have no idea what that means either. If they are to come out and do battle with Facebook’s newly launched integration with music, then they will need to develop some serious tools to do this, or at least focus on a niche that they can do well, such as live streaming concerts and intimate gigs.

So what do they have planned specifically? Early screenshots show a social playlist that will live on the right hand side of the site and fully as-supported music and video streaming. Is this really enough to come back with a bang and show the world why Myspace is relevant again?

working with record labels

The CEO of Myspace and co-founder of Specific Media has discussed the new launch of Myspace and specifically where their strengths lie with the ‘big four’ record labels. “No other company has the rights MySpace has,” says Tim Vanderhook, who along with brother Chris is co-founder of Specific Media and CEO of MySpace. “Nobody has the relationships we have with the four major labels, the catalog of 25,000 independent artists and 42 million songs. If you take Facebook’s music announcements with Rdio, MOG and Spotify and you aggregated all those services up and took their audio catalog, it’s not even half of what MySpace has.”

What they have also outlined specifically is plans to take on internet radio – a space which is currently very much owned by Pandora. Though what’s still not clear is whether this will focus on independent or established artists. On the one hand, Tim Vanderhook that under News Corp, Myspace lost the association of independent artists that they once had, which was bad for the site. Yet on the other hand they have an international artist as their creative director and are boasting of their unrivalled relationships with the big music artists.

This is something that they need to sort out quickly, as they need to establish their stance with the public. Are they a place fo internet radio, live streaming, indie music, big names, or are they trying to a bit of all of these? If you want to find out a bit more about what’s planned at Myspace, check out their pitch deck , where for some reason they’ve decided to include a graph that shows only half of the people surveyed had heard of them as a music social network, behind Pandora who they claim they can compete with.