It’s not quite live yet, but the marketing campaign has quietly begun, CNET reports. And it’s true to the core interest group of its earliest, pre-News Corp.-acquisition days: Before Facebook seriously began replacing it for teens in 2008, MySpace “had become a powerful music platform. If you were in the music business in whatever capacity, you had to visit the site regularly,” CNET says. Ad Age adds that “the company’s [record] label deals are still in place, and it scored a coup [last week], when judge ruled that Apple couldn’t trademark its music icon because it could confuse consumers with the one for Myspace.” You can preview it at New.myspace.com, which “features a slick video touting a service flush with photos, video, and music from young and beautiful people,” according to CNET. And it does look as if the site itself, if not all its users, will be beautiful. Designed by a digital agency in Brisbane, Australia, it doesn’t look like it’s anything close to the user self-expression tool that made the old MySpace so attractive to teens. This site seems to be aimed more narrowly and at an older demographic – not that that ever stopped teens, but if it offers an experience that’s less customizable, which was a key differentiating factor in 2005-’08, it will need to catch up to and surpass relative “newcomers” to the media-sparing space Spotify (partnered with Facebook) and YouTube with its huge music-video category. So it’ll be fun to watch how MySpace the sequel does! [For a little background and context, see “MySpace’s PR problem”https://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=28338 (Feb. 2009).]
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