The New MySpace Launches — And Old Blogs Vanish

The new MySpace launched publicly in June 2013, and the first thing a lot of returning users noticed was that their writing was gone.

Suit & Tie

The relaunch was timed to Justin Timberlake's return to music, with "Suit & Tie" and *The 20/20 Experience* serving as the promotional engine. The strategy was straightforward: use a genuine cultural moment to relaunch a brand that had not had one since 2008.

The product that arrived was the horizontal, music-first design previewed the year before, now open to everyone. Clean, dark, fast, art-directed. On its own terms, a competent modern service. Press coverage from Wired, The Guardian and others was broadly positive about the craft and broadly sceptical about the premise.

The blogs

Then people logged in.

Years of MySpace blog posts — the long, unfiltered, often adolescent writing that a generation had done on the platform between 2004 and 2010 — did not survive the migration to the new system. Neither did comments, bulletins, and much of the surrounding social record. Users discovered this by going to look for it and finding nothing.

MySpace's response was that the new platform was a new product and the old data was not compatible with it. Technically, that was defensible. Practically, it destroyed the strongest asset the relaunch had.

Analysis: this is the decision I find hardest to explain, and the one that most deserves to be labelled clearly as opinion. MySpace's entire pitch for a comeback was custody of your past. It was the only thing it possessed that Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and Instagram did not. In 2013 it launched a nostalgia-adjacent relaunch and, in the same motion, deleted the nostalgia. Everything that happened afterward — including the far more serious 2019 data loss — reads as a continuation of the same institutional attitude: user history treated as legacy overhead rather than as the product.

The numbers

The launch produced a spike, as launches do. Reported sign-ups climbed into the millions across 2013 and the property's traffic ticked up from a very low base. It did not hold. By the end of the year the story had reverted to the one it had been in 2012: an attractive product with no structural reason for anyone to make it a daily habit.

The people

The Vanderhooks continued to run and fund the company. Timberlake's active involvement wound down as the album cycle ended. Tom Anderson, by now several years into photography, was occasionally asked what he thought of the new MySpace and generally declined to relitigate it.

What it felt like

Like going home to get a box out of the attic and finding the attic had been converted. The house looked better. Everything you came for was gone.

Why this matters in 2026

If a MySpace relaunch happens, the single most valuable thing it can offer is not a feed, an editor, or an AI feature. It is the archive: the profiles, the photos, the songs, and the writing that still exist for the people who made them.

2013 is the year MySpace learned that lesson the expensive way and did not learn it, which is why 2019 happened.