A Ghost Town That Artists Still Used

By 2014 the honest description of MySpace was a ghost town where people still played music.

The state of it

The 2013 relaunch had come and gone. The traffic spike had decayed. What remained was a well-designed, modestly staffed music and entertainment property with a fraction of a percent of its former cultural footprint, quietly profitable to operate inside an advertising business that made most of its money elsewhere.

That description sounds like failure, and by the standard of 2006 it is. By the standard of every other social network of MySpace's generation, it is remarkable. Friendster shut down. Bebo went bankrupt and got bought back for pennies. Orkut closed. MySpace kept its lights on, kept its servers running, and kept its catalogue online.

The artists who stayed

The reason it stayed alive was musicians.

Not famous ones, for the most part. The long tail — regional bands, producers, DJs, artists with a few thousand listeners and a decade-old page that still ranked in search results and still had their early recordings on it. For those people MySpace was not a social network they had abandoned. It was a discography they had not moved.

Entire genres carry MySpace fingerprints for this reason. The mid-2000s scene ecosystems — emo, crunk, grime, hyphy, early dubstep, bedroom electronica — had their formative distribution here, and a lot of that material existed nowhere else. That fact would matter enormously five years later, and not in a good way.

Analysis: 2014 MySpace is the best available case study in what happens to a platform after the network effect leaves. The social value collapses to near zero, because social value is entirely a function of who else is there. The archival value does not collapse at all — it appreciates, because the material becomes scarcer and more historically interesting every year. MySpace spent this period behaving as though it were still a network with a traffic problem, when it had already become an archive with a preservation responsibility. The mismatch between what it was and what it thought it was is the through-line of the second decade.

The people

Tim Vanderhook as CEO, Chris Vanderhook as COO, running MySpace as one property within a larger advertising technology company that would soon be consolidated under the Viant name. The strategic value of MySpace to that business was increasingly its registered-user data — a large, long-lived, opted-in identity graph useful for ad targeting — rather than its page views.

Tom Anderson was on Instagram posting photographs of mountains and getting more engagement per post than most of MySpace was getting per day.

What it felt like

Like a place you could still visit. Occasionally somebody would link an old profile and you would go look, and it would load, and the song would be there, and it would be genuinely affecting for about ninety seconds. Then you would close the tab and not return for a year.

Why this matters in 2026

Everything the current owners are able to talk about relaunching exists because somebody kept paying for storage during the years when nobody was watching. That is not a triumphant story, but it is the reason there is a story at all.

The question 2014 poses for the relaunch is simple: is MySpace coming back as a network, or as the memory of one? Those are different products with different economics, and the honest answer determines whether this works.