myspace

The first Vampire Weekend album took off without flaw. Now the band is streaming their sophomore album, Contra, in its entirety on their myspace. The album is scheduled to drop on the 12th. From the sound of it, this album's gonna be worth the two year wait.

To say Myspace is making some changes is an understatement.... Besides laying off a bunch of people, they've decided to get rid of their 'tagline' - A Place For Friends. It's just Myspace, now. Read more on techcrunch here.

LA Times is reporting that Facebook (who trumped Myspace in the worldwide user battle a year ago) has officially surpassed Myspace in the U.S. this past month with 70 million +

According to this article, Myspace is declining at a rate that will put them in serious danger. Obviously, changes have been made at the top in order to reverse the trend, but we'll see if/how it works out...

Just read an interesting article on the "life" of the social network in The Big Money.   My favorite part is this snippet about the teenage years of the Social Network.

The copycats emerge. (Age: 13-19; the aggressively competitive teenager)
With the first generation of social networks out of the way, a slew of copycats bubble up. Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Ning, etc. Convinced (and rightly so) that social networking is the future of the Web, these new sites all try to build upon fertile ground. It's a wild time, full of experimentation and competition for the most users and the flashiest tools. There's so much excitement that everybody ignores the history lesson on the tragedy of the commons.

click here for the article

As expected, Owen Van Natta is officially the new CEO of Myspace... The former chief revenue officer/vp of operations for Facebook will now be reporting to Jonathan Miller (ceo of News Corp digital media). Read the techcrunch story here.

Techcrunch has confirmed that the core executive team of Myspace will definitely be terminated.... Read more here.

There are some rumors floating around as to whether Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson will remain at Myspace. Apparently their current contracts end in Oct. and there hasn't been any substantial re-negotiation between the two and News Corp.

Myspace has been struggling to grow (to be fair, they do generate respectable ad revenues unlike others) and recently lost some key execs; so we'll see what happens. Read the techcrunch story here.

Looks like somebody is a little irked about not getting that streaming money...

Read it over here.

The funny thing about web 2.0's and social media is that after all the fuss/buzz around post-myspace companies (and how Myspace got a bad $ deal when Rupert Murdoch bought 'em in 2005), Myspace is still the only one who's generating respectable revenues. So while other 'hot' web 2.0's (I won't name names) get their egos stroked by the media, Myspace has steadily built a working monetization system.  

Read the latest Techcrunch article here.